It had done its job, however. I had stopped long enough for him to disengage from me. Then Abner found his feet and brushed off his own T-shirt, which was adorned with a blow-up of the Variety article about his screenplay gig.
Abner put the little gun into a drawer of the kitchen table and shut it. Panting, he told me, “Taylor keeps it around for protection. I think they’re pellets. Whatever it shoots, they ain’t bullets.”
His stalker had a phony gun; so did Abner. Coins were fake; checks couldn’t be cashed. In the world Abner moved in, the risks were phony and even death was negotiable. I alone was left in the place where things either hurt like hell or were lost forever. I didn’t like it.
“Look,” I said, “I might have Clown.”
Abner looked up from his next position, his head under the faucet, cold water running on his generous neck. His move was sudden, and the water splashed all over his hair.
“What?” he said, dripping wet.
“You heard me.”
I had revealed my deepest secret to my worst archrival. What else could I do? I wanted to be back in action, and a detective needs a bankroll. These days, everyone was merging; big fish ate little fish; Abner Cooley could be my—what do they call it?—corporate parent. I wasn’t proud of it, but what was I ever proud of? This was what I told myself.
I had taken a risk, too. Maybe Abner had gone so far Hollywood that such a trivial pursuit no longer interested him. Yet, when I saw him staring, oblivious to the water that flooded his face, hair, and shirt, I knew that he still had needs more irrational than money or fame.
“Tell me,” he whispered.
After I did, Abner was hyperventilating and had to sit. He breathed a few times into a paper bag from Fairway. Then, without hesitation, he agreed to foot the bill if I’d do the dirty work.
We would share possession of The Day the Clown Cried, if in fact I found it. Now a “professional,” he insisted on writing up a contract. So we scribbled a few terms on the back of his e-mail threat. Then he wrote me a new check and signed it this time.
When I told him the address of my upcoming meeting, he reopened the table drawer. Then Abner placed the gun into my hand.
“Forget it,” I said.
“Hey, look, it fooled you, didn’t it?”
I shrugged, then shoved it into a small side pocket of my pants. Like so many things I possessed, I only wanted it because it was worthless.
Abner walked me to the elevator, which an elegant attendant manned. Despite the disparity in our fortunes, and our mutual hatred, we were partners now. Still, there was one piece of unfinished business.
As the door closed, I said, “I think it’s Stanley Lager.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who’s been trying to kill you.”
Before I traveled down, I saw only the faintest recognition in Abner’s eyes that this had ever happened. He had bigger fish to fry now.
So did I. Bigger than my mother, I mean. She would have to wait.
THE FLOPHOUSE WHERE THE CLOWN MAN STAYED WAS ON WEST THIRTY-sixth Street, not far from my apartment. It was crushed between a bodega and a karaoke club. And The Gladiola smelled anything but sweet.
The lobby looked like a bus station, circa 1952. At least that’s what I assumed from seeing movies. There were a few torn leather chairs and a couch the springs of which had long ago burst. The old guy behind the counter probably couldn’t remember the last time he washed his hair. When I mentioned Room 54, he only shrugged and pointed me to a nearby stairwell. It stood beside an elevator on which hung a sign that said “BROKEN,” complete with misused quotation marks.
As I climbed five flights that smelled of pee, I felt Abner’s little gun in my pocket, pressed against my shin. The tense twitching of my eyelid reminded me that I had no idea what I was getting into.
I thought of the uncompleted Bogart Slept Here, Mike Nichols’s movie of Neil Simon’s script, starring Marsha Mason and Robert De Niro. It was scrapped in the seventies for reasons still unclear, though some said De Niro wasn’t so funny after doing Taxi Driver. It had reemerged, rewritten and recast, as The Goodbye Girl.
The fifth-floor stairwell door needed a hard push to open. Then I walked on a chewed-up hall runner, hearing sounds of afternoon TV talk shows and a baby crying. When I reached the door marked 54, it differed conspicuously from the others.
It was open.
Not all the way. It creaked open the second that I placed my knuckles on the wood to knock. Maybe, expecting my appearance, the mystery man had gotten the ball rolling. But no reply came when I raised my voice.
“Hello? Hey, uh,” and here I felt stupid, “Ted6569? It’s me … Roy Milano?”
It was one room, with a bed—still made—a rickety table, and a TV attached to a stand by a chain. A window was covered by a torn and gently blowing blind. The bathroom was to the left.
That was where the breathing came from.
It was labored and inconsistent. Sometimes there was a normal inhale-exhale, then a second of silence, then a wheeze or a moan. It grew louder, then softer, then stopped, then started up again.
It took a few broad steps from the door to get there. It seemed like the longest walk of my life. When I reached the doorway, I peered slowly around it, like a panning camera. But the guy on the bathroom floor wasn’t acting.
He was propped up against the can. He was old, in his seventies maybe, wearing an old-guy undershirt, khaki pants, and sneakers that had seen better days. For his age, he was trim and fit. But his face was the color of the gray wall behind him.
He looked up at me, shocked and helpless.
“The other guy …” he began to say.
Then his breath came faster and faster before it stopped altogether.
“WHAT’D YOU SAY YOU WERE DOING THERE?”
I sat in a precinct interrogation room, before a detective named Florent. I’d been passed off to him by the patrolmen who’d arrived at the scene. (I’d called the police the other time I’d found a dead body, too. Mistake or not, it makes for good citizenship.)
