NINETEEN
GORDON JAINWAYS SAT morosely in the cab in the depths of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. “What are we going to do if he is there?” Gordon demanded with a glare.
“Do? I don’t know. Talk to him. About Billie.”
From the middle of the Verrazano Bridge, I could see nothing of the Downtown towers, Manhattan lost in the murk.
“What do you propose? Do you propose we barge in on him and peer into his burned face? ‘Is that you under there, D.B.?’”
My proposal didn’t seem quite that crass until he spelled it out. It was easily that crass.
Nothing had changed at Bright Bay. Probably nothing ever changed except the grinding turnover of residents. I peeked in. The lobby was full of old folks. Gordon was at the desk talking to the receptionist. He was to draw her away by asking for his sister, leaving the way clear for me to slip into the residence wing, but the lobby was too crowded.
The receptionist stood up and tinkled a little bell. “Dinner is served,” she announced.
Obsessives need to remain flexible, ever ready to modify crass plans when an even crasser alternative arises. Perhaps the receptionist would leave her post; perhaps she would even join the others for dinner, leaving me to slip into the residence wing unseen by anyone. I waited five minutes, then entered the empty lobby. I could hear the clank of dishes and the mix of elderly voices from the rec room as I slipped through the double doors that separated the residence wing from the lobby. I ignored the sign that said PRIVATE in gilded letters. The hall extended deeper than I had imagined, then turned to the right. I began to knock on doors. When no one answered, I opened the doors. None was locked. Each room was a simple single like a college dorm room, personalized with sweet touches of home and heart, framed photos of loved ones, down comforters, toiletries and private objects, the mementos of long lives, the past fixed and the future predictable; but those poignant fragments didn’t dissuade me. A woman approached, shuffling down the hall on her aluminum walker. I recognized her. Elwood Dibbs had put a flower in the top buttonhole of her sweater. What was her name? Dibbs had asked her about her feet. Mrs. Florian.
“How do you do?” I said.
“Good evening,” she smiled, and continued her trek to the dining room. When she passed through the double doors and into the lobby, I continued my search. I knocked on number 10. No answer. I opened it. A Raggedy Ann doll sat propped against the pillow on the neatly made bed. I went inside. Her clothes, dresses mostly, were hung in perfect order in the doorless closet. They smelled gently of flowers. Jasmine?
Then I saw the framed photograph above the headboard. A large photograph, perhaps fifteen by twenty, and slightly grainy for that reason, it showed Billie and her mother, the two Eleanors, in a room standing arm in arm, smiling. What room? I stepped closer. It was Billie’s studio. Unmistakably. They looked happy together. When was this picture taken? I left before I started to cry. Never before last Sunday night had my life been so filled with intense and quickly changing emotion.
I opened six more doors, numbers 11 through 16, before I took a break, turned right, and walked to the end of the long hall. Two more double doors. I pushed them open, and the hallway changed completely. The floor inclined slightly, a rubber runner for traction, to still another set of double doors, but these were different. These were made of polished aluminum, with small glass ports reinforced with chicken wire between the panes. A janitor’s bucket on wheels was propped against one door, holding it open. I looked in.
It was an operating room! Tanks of oxygen and other gasses, a high aluminum table with a circle of powerful lights suspended from the ceiling above, machines with little green windows overlaid with red grid lines, many other gadgets and arcane apparatus, most of which appeared as hulking, vague shapes, since only one small fluorescent light was on. The doctors were still doing it.
“Excuse me, sir—”
“Ha!”
He was a lanky Hispanic guy about sixteen. He wore a white uniform and carried two spray bottles of cleaning fluid. “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but guests aren’t allowed back here.”
“I guess I’m lost. I’m looking for Danny Beemon.”
“Beemon…Beemon? Don’t know anybody by that name.”
“He was burned a long time ago.”
“Oh, sure. That must be Ace.”
“Ace?”
“He likes you to call him Ace. He’s in seventeen.”
“He is?”
“Back down the hall right where it turns left.” He pointed.
I nearly ran.
Number 17. The door was closed. I knocked. No one answered, so I gently opened the door.
He sat in a wheelchair silhouetted against the dull light from the picture window. Head hanging, he seemed to be sleeping. Across the arms of the chair lay a metal dinner tray, but instead of food the tray contained pieces of a plastic airplane model, the fuselage already assembled. It was a Hawker Typhoon. Other plastic planes hung from the ceiling on nearly invisible monofilament strings, single-engine fighters, all of them, all meticulously painted, an instant frozen from a forty-year-old dogfight in miniature. His hand moved. He wasn’t sleeping. He looked up at me.
His face was scarred and twisted. His upper lip was gone, or fused into the flesh above it, exposing teeth and gums. Except for a tiny tuft above his left ear, he had no hair, and his right ear was absent entirely. When I was a boy, an older neighbor taught me to assemble plastic models, airplanes, ships, cars, my interest following his. Barrett was his name. He’s dead now. When Barrett’s models broke or when he simply grew tired of them, he’d arrange them on the garage floor, squirt on lighter fluid, and set them on fire. We younger boys would gather to watch, say, the Forrestal burn while we imagined the real thing. “Neat,” Barrett would say as the flames buckled the flight deck. I thought of Barrett and his sacrifices at that moment because when they were over, when only a puddle of charred plastic remained, they looked exactly like this man’s face. The fingers of his right hand, which reached for his Typhoon, were fused into a claw. The hand stopped in mid-movement when he saw me.
“I—I beg your pardon. Wrong room.” I closed the door and stood trembling on the red carpet in the silent hallway. I don’t know how long I stood before, mechanically, I began phase two of my plan. I really didn’t have the stomach for it anymore, but we had come this far…Could Gordon recognize anyone under all that scar tissue, let alone a man he hadn’t seen for decades? Did he need to? Wasn’t it clear who the burned man was?
I returned to one of the empty rooms I had already violated. Phase two depended on the phones. I hoped for private lines independent of the switchboard. The room I chose in a random fog had a phone with a number on the dial different from that of Bright Bay. It took ten rings or so before a woman answered, “Good evening. Bright Bay, may I help you?”
“Could I speak to Mr. Gordon Jainways? He’s visiting Eleanor Burke.”
“Oh, yes. I believe he’s in the dining facility. Please hold.”
Gordon answered in a voice filled with trepidation.
“I found him. I found him.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Gordon.
“Room 17. You go through the double doors to the right of the desk.”
“Oh, yes, I see.”
“Can you get away? Unseen?”
“Yes, that will be fine.” He hung up, and I waited in the hall seemingly for a couple of days before Gordon pushed open the doors. He barely glanced at me.
“They’ve got an operating room!” I squeaked. “The end of the hall. Keene and Osley—they’re doing it again.” But Gordon didn’t respond to that news; he wouldn’t even look at me.
“Room 17 is this way.” And he fell in behind me as we marched off.
I knocked on number 17, then pushed the door open for Jainways. Gordon stiffened at the sight framed in the dreary harbor light. They stared at each other for a long time, me peeking in like a sick joke. Then Gordon said, “Good God, D.B., is that you?”
The burned man began to cry. Then I realized there was someone behind me. Flowers. Jasmine? I spun. Face-to-face with Eleanor Beemon, who said, “Excuse me, please,” and stepped into the room. She said nothing more. She walked past her brother as if he were a stranger and knelt painfully down beside the wheelchair. She put her arms around Danny Beemon’s neck, and he, still sobbing, lowered his face into her jasmine-scented gray hair. All four of us held that tableau.
“Eleanor, it’s me, Gordon.” But she didn’t look up.
A hand grabbed the back of my shirt and jerked me sharply away from the door, shoving me into the opposite wall. It was Elwood Dibbs, and his face was contorted with rage. I saw him take a wrinkled handful of Gordon’s tweeds between the shoulder blades and yank him nearly off his feet, out the door. Dibbs closed it quietly, then turned on us. The tips of his ears glowed like embers.
“Get out!” He shot a finger at the double doors. We started walking that way like scolded boys caught at the bathhouse peephole.
“Listen for a moment, Mr. Dibbs, perhaps you’re not aware of what just went on here. That’s Danny Beemon. Eleanor Burke, uh, Beemon, is his wife. Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”
He shoved me from behind. “Get out! You, too!” And he shoved Gordon. “You have no idea, Mr. Deemer! No idea about anything, but if you have the slightest shred of decency, you’ll leave all these people alone.”
“Woody—”
“Shut up, Mr. Deemer. You lied to me about the police. You didn’t keep them away. You brought them!”
“What? What do you mean?” By that time he was marching us through the lobby.
“The FBI was here this morning to question Eleanor. They told her, Mr. Deemer. They just came out and told her that her daughter was murdered.”
“But how did I bring—?”
“Get out!” He threw us into the rain, where we stood for a time, trying to collect ourselves.
Finally, I turned to Jainways. “If the FBI is questioning Eleanor, then they must know—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Deemer, but I don’t want to hear it. In fact, I’ve heard quite enough from you, period. I’m going home, perhaps by ferry, perhaps by cab, but whatever my means, I want to travel without you. I don’t want any further contact with you.” Gordon Jainways turned and walked down the hill toward St. George Road and the ferry slip.
I put my face up to the slate clouds and let the raindrops slap my eyes.