Last Words Read online

  His stomach made a grumbling noise, a complaint Taylor ignored. His body might think he needed to eat, but he had no interest. He’d lost interest in food after he’d written the story that got him demoted two months ago. Tonight he had work to do on his own time, and he needed to get his damn obits done first. Coffee would go down nice; he’d grab that on the way up to the paper.

  Five-foot piles of rock-hard grimy snow walled the sidewalk from the street. The Messenger-Telegram’s offices were four broad avenues away, between Park and Lex, a pleasant walk across 28th Street if New York weren’t in the grip of the freeze. Taylor hiked his collar up. The other pedestrians were muffled in heavy overcoats and parkas, scarves and hats. He should have put on something like that, instead of Billy’s jacket. This morning he’d considered longjohns but couldn’t find any in the disarray of the Airstream trailer. He woke later than his usual late and rushed to get dressed, once he realized—with a loud curse—that the hot water heater was on the fritz. Should he get the water heater fixed? That might delay repair work on his house, and he was spending everything he could on that.

  Six months ago, he’d broken the story on a ring of corrupt detectives on the Harlem vice squad and received a Molotov cocktail through the window as thanks. He needed to get out of the damn trailer in his driveway. His neighbors were running out of patience.

  Chapter 2

  The Messenger-Telegram was the Frankenstein’s monster of New York newspapers. Part Daily Telegram, part New York Messenger and part Morning Star, all grafted together in a bid to survive declining readership, white flight to the suburbs and the greatest newspaper killer of them all, TV news. The New York Journal-American, The New York Herald Tribune and eight other papers had died by ’67. Of course, everyone knew the Times would go on forever, and the Daily News would go on as long as there was a borough of Queens. But the MT—spelled Empty by the wise guys at the Village Voice—owed its financial survival to the Garfield family and the New Haven Life Insurance Company.

  In the lobby of the New Haven Life Building, Taylor stopped in Frieda’s, ordered coffee—two creams, two sugars—and took a long sip. The warm creamy drink fooled his stomach and stopped the growling.

  Next stop, Cranston’s, a newsstand that had papers from all over the country in neat stacks, pile after pile. Taylor reviewed them. Nameplates, headlines, pictures, stories. Studying the way various papers played a crime, who was claiming a scoop, what held the fascination of people in other cities. He picked up the Des Moines Register and checked out a triple homicide. Violent death in the Midwest seemed out of place to him.

  He took the elevator up and it opened on the huge newsroom occupying the entire tenth floor. The perfect space to house a couple hundred insurance salesman, or in this case, journalists. He made his way through a bewildering maze of desks, partitions, bookcases, support pillars, file cabinets, wood and glass offices built in seemingly random locations, typewriter tables and chairs owned by no specific desk. The staff of the paper moved in two years ago after a desperate merger. A tremendous amount of crap had filled the space, like the way a coral reef sprung up without any plan. The clutter made the room seem even larger than it was because you couldn’t see the outer walls. Most visitors got lost after they turned a couple of corners.

  Taylor could walk the newsroom blind, knew it as a map of territories and influence. Actual offices meant position. Their proximity to Editor-in-Chief Oscar Garfield equaled real power. He wound his way to the City Desk outside Garfield’s glass office amid the clattering of typewriters and the keys struck at different speeds and in different rhythms—an uneven rolling noise, a kind of newsroom surf that energized him every time he heard it.

  City Editor Bradford J. Worth Jr., one of five men sitting inside a horseshoe of pushed-together desks, marked copy with a pencil, skimming over lines, correcting, cutting words, adding his own, slashing paragraphs. He moved on to the next page, ignoring the shadow Taylor cast across his desk. Taylor wasn’t surprised. Everyone under the city editor lived by the man’s schedule and whims. Taylor knew how to wait. Every story, in the end, was about waiting. Finally, the pencil halted and the city editor looked up. “What?” Which meant, Go away.

  Worth’s features were fine and precise, as if their owner had edited them himself. He was younger than he looked or acted. Three years younger than Taylor, in fact, and ambitious in a predatory way. He had risen rapidly through the newsroom without ever going out on the street to report a story.

  “Got a story idea for you, Chief.”

  “I’m not your goddamned chief. Marmelli’s your boss now. There are no ideas in obituaries. Only the dead.”

  Worth tapped the eraser rapidly on the paper. Taylor leaned on the corner of the desk. Worth hated people touching any part of the pristine maple surface. His inbox was filled with an evenly stacked pile. The out box was empty. That was it, except for the copy Worth was editing, and as Taylor slid a bit farther, a chunk of ass.

  Having a lead made Taylor reckless, as if he’d already won his job back. “Don’t want to write it, just see that it gets covered. I heard something about a police shooting in Harlem.”

  Worth fixed light blue eyes on Taylor, a pucker of skin above his nose the beginning of a frown. “Fahey’s on it. I don’t have time for this. Or you.”

  “The cops ordered all the kids taken to Bellevue to avoid a demonstration at Harlem Hospital. Some kids probably died because of that decision.”

  “Fahey knows what the hell he’s doing. Five kids shot. One dead so far. A cop stabbed. A riot still ongoing. That’s more than enough story for him to worry about. If I find out you’re doing anything but obits, you’ll be out before next Monday.”

  Taylor slid off the desk and shook his head. “A man in a newsroom who doesn’t want to hear about news.”

  “I warned you.” Worth spoke with cool pleasure.

  Taylor wound his way to Obituaries, a distant principality in the windowless southeast corner of the newsroom, as far from the center of power as it was possible to get. The other desk was unoccupied. Lou Marmelli, like the undertakers he dealt with, kept civil, bankers’ hours, while Taylor refused to change from the schedule of a police reporter, showing up late in the morning and not leaving until the bulldog edition came off the presses. That was one of the many reasons Marmelli disliked him.

  Two pink “While You Were Out” slips were taped to his phone. After he was taken off the police beat, his message count had plummeted from a pad a day to this. One was from his carpenter, Mahoney, who either wanted a payment or had found another problem. Calls from Mahoney were never good news. The other was from Laura Wheeler, the second of the day. “Stop dodging me. You owe me a lunch.” Laura worked the police beat, and was in fact the first woman assigned to cops since World War II.

  The neat script on the message slip made him think of Laura and her warm brown eyes. Intelligence. Concern. Laughter. Those eyes had knocked the chip off. He’d dropped his prejudice against her Columbia degree and Upper Eastside connections and asked her to lunch the day he finished the front-page story on a nine-year-old heroin addict. It was supposed to be a celebration, but the next day the little girl disappeared, along with the cop who arranged the interview. Taylor had been set up. Newsroom scandal, the paper’s retraction, and his demotion followed.

  He wasn’t going to sit with her now, the big failure banished to Obituaries. It was a large newsroom, maybe not large enough to avoid her forever, but he was giving it a try. He snapped the message slip once with his finger and tossed it.

  Marmelli left three late deaths for him to deal with—Park Avenue proctologist, city councilman who served in the ’50s, and society matron. He wrote those in an hour, running on autopilot.

  After that, he pulled out his notebook and reviewed the national flags sewn onto the field jacket the dead boy wore. There was no pattern in the arrangement of the flags that he could see. This was an odd death. The John Doe might have died the quiet dream of h
ypothermia, if you ignored the fact his clothes appeared to have been soaked in water and frozen to him. Had that happened before or after he died? How? What was the kid doing in the Meatpacking District? There were no shelters down there. He considered the clean fingernails and the five other homeless people killed on the street by the bitter cold. Billy’s memory kept intruding, that hard black thing deep down inside. He snapped the notebook shut. The only dead kid he could do anything about was the teenager in the morgue—the one who interested nobody as either a police case or a news story. What he didn’t know was how to get it in the paper. Still, he had to get it first. The teen might have been involved in drugs or prostitution. He’d talk to a guy he knew who worked Eighth Avenue. This was the hard slog of reporting, but oh how he loved it. He was on to something that could become a story.

  He made a few calls to old sources and learned only that no one wanted to talk to the ex-top police reporter. He checked the wire printers on the way out.

  SAIGON, March 10, 1975 (UPI)—The city of Ban Me Thout fell today to the army of North Vietnam in what appears to be a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam.

  The foreign desk had done little with the story since the North came over the border. Tomorrow he planned to talk to Roger Novak, the foreign editor. He wanted the story to get the play his brother’s sacrifice deserved. That was concrete; getting something in the paper was something he knew how to do.

  He left the paper at seven-thirty. Tonight, for starters, he needed to see a homeless man named Harry Jansen.

  Chapter 3

  Taylor took the No. 6 train to Grand Central, changed to the No. 7 to get to Port Authority and walked the rest of the way into Hell’s Kitchen. Snow fell heavy and fast, covering the sidewalk and reducing visibility to less than a block. The pedestrian traffic thinned to nothing and the cars dwindled as he walked west on 47th, crossing 11th Avenue. A massive hulk resolved into the half-completed West Side Freight Terminal, a Mayor Lindsay project that was conceived to bring blue-collar jobs back to the neighborhood. It was abandoned early in the city’s fiscal crisis. Instead of jobs, it now offered shelter to those who had none.

  Taylor stopped at a heavy plastic sheet that served as a door, pushed it aside, entered and tucked the plastic back into place under a cinderblock. Bed sheets, canvas, plywood, plastic—any kind of material that could be scrounged—had been draped over the lower skeleton of the unfinished building. The wind banged the plastic sheets, making a cracking, snapping sound.

  The passage opened into a bigger space. People breathed and shifted against one another. A large ring of cinderblocks stacked two and three high circled a bonfire fed on pieces of lumber. A four-by-four tumbled from the top of the fire, exploding into hot coals and embers. Sparks formed a constellation, rose and winked out before they reached the darkness above. Sitting figures crowded three deep around the flames, sharing the warmth of bodies and the fire. Wood smoke mixed with human musk. Showers were something else this makeshift homeless shelter didn’t offer.

  The plastic at the back wall banged some more, a sail hit by a gust. The draft blew the smoke at Taylor. The odor of tar and burning plastic caught at the back of his throat. He blinked his eyes and stepped to the left.

  “Taylor of the New York Messenger-Telegram. It has been some time.” The deep voice came from the other side of the fire circle. “We were … I don’t know how to put it. Amazed is wrong, since Sammy was beaten to death. Impressed? Shocked? You wrote about his murder in your paper. Forced the police to investigate. They even arrested the guy. We die all the time. No one takes notice.”

  “Murders should always be investigated.”

  “Controversial view in the city of New York.” Taylor caught Harry Jansen’s hint of a smile through the shimmering hot air above the fire. Jansen was dressed as Taylor had last seen him. Dark blue overcoat, gray morning coat and charcoal slacks—the suit you rented for a wedding. Taylor moved around the ring of blocks toward Jansen. The fire appeared in miniature in Jansen’s large green eyes. “We bought copies. To keep in his memory. What was the point of putting those stories in your newspaper?”

  “It’s not my paper. Like I said when I first visited—”

  “I read the paper every day. I don’t see your byline anymore.”

  “I was reassigned. No bylines for obits.” It embarrassed Taylor to say it out loud, even here. That just brought on guilt. These people had bigger problems than he’d ever known.

  “None of us died today,” said Jansen.

  “There’s a dead boy at Bellevue. Looks homeless. Looks like he froze to death.”

  “What do you mean ‘looks’?”

  “No ID. No autopsy yet.”

  “Right now, freezing to death is easier than going for a walk.”

  “Six, counting this kid.”

  “Six? Six. It’s that bad.”

  Taylor reached inside his jacket and pulled out the Polaroid headshot.

  “Does he look familiar?” Taylor offered the photo. “He was found in the Meatpacking District.”

  “He’s not homeless.”

  The response came too quick. He needed Jansen to be sure. “Look at it. I have to know.”

  Jansen held up the picture. “Don’t know him. If he was in the Gansevoort Market, no way he’s homeless. No shelters. No overpasses. It’s a bad neighborhood at night. Worse in the day, if that’s possible.”

  “Doesn’t mean he couldn’t have ended up there.”

  “The neighborhood’s Mafia controlled. We negatively impact upon their quality of life. We’re not even allowed to walk through. They don’t move you along with a little prod like Officer O’Billyclub. They beat on you hard.”

  “Maybe this kid,” Taylor pointed to the picture, “didn’t know any better and ended up down there.”

  “All the people on the street know better. He wasn’t homeless if he was found there.”

  “Everyone else look, please.” Taylor handed it to the person nearest in the circle and the picture started its way around the fire.

  “No.”

  “Nope.”

  “Man, so young. Don’t know him.”

  All nos. Taylor took the shot when it came back.

  “How did he die?” Jansen asked.

  “Oddly. It looks like he was soaked in water, maybe before he died. His underclothes were frozen to him. He wore an army field jacket. I’m sure it’s the key to his identity. The arms are covered in flags up and down both sleeves.”

  “Voichek?” Fear entered Jansen’s eyes. “Let me see that picture.” He looked at it again. “I don’t know this boy. Why would he have on Voichek’s jacket?”

  “You’re sure it’s Voichek’s?”

  “Without seeing it, pretty sure. Mark Voichek’s been wearing one with all these flags on the sleeves since World War II. It doesn’t make any sense. He’d never give it away.”

  “Spell the last name.” Jansen did and Taylor wrote it in his notebook. “Did he own heavily patched jeans and a blue V-neck sweater?”

  “Don’t know about the sweater, but he had jeans like that. A lot of people on the street do.”

  Here was the real beginning. A scoop started with a lead. That little item, scrap of evidence, bit of hearsay that set him on the chase. That was why he loved this job. The thrill when a hunch proved true and every question took him closer to breaking the story.

  “Why all the flags?”

  “Voichek said this to me once, and only once, ‘I fought the war that won the peace and created the great United Nations. I had a hand in that.’ Sounds goofy these days, but he was serious. Said it was the most important thing he’d done in his life. So he put all those flags on his sleeves. He won two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star fighting in Africa and Italy. Never wore those. Never talked about it again. A real-live hero hiding with the rest of us on the street.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Taylor looked up from the notebook.
r />   “Means nothing.” Jansen spoke with an edge, his usual confidence gone. “He doesn’t always stay here. Except for five years in the army, he was an honest-to-God hobo—riding the rails during the Great Depression, through the fifties and sixties, right up until a few years ago. He finally stopped in New York because they padlocked the boxcars. There’s no one better at surviving on the streets.”

  “I’d worry now. This dead boy showed up dressed in a jacket you say Voichek wouldn’t part with. That’s not a good sign. Either he was involved—”

  “Never! Something twisted has happened. You said you’re writing obituaries now. Why are you bothering with this?”

  Taylor put his faith in the connections. The kid had on Voichek’s clothing. The body was found in a neighborhood the homeless didn’t dare enter. The kid and Voichek were connected somehow. The why of it all, that was for later. The who first. Who’s the killer? Who’s the kid? He needed to ID the victim before worrying about the motive.

  “It’s a story.” They can’t ignore a good story, not even Worthless.

  Whack, Whack, WHACK!

  A loud racket from outside the shelter. The room went quiet.

  Whack, Whack, WHACK!

  “It’s the Street Sweepers.” Jansen spoke with urgent authority. “We need to move. Let’s go! Out the back way, everyone. Grab your things along the hall and follow your division leaders. They just want to scare us. Keep to the plan and no one will get hurt.”

  The bundles sitting around the fire rose and ghosted out of the room in drilled fashion. The banging got louder, lost all of its rhythm and became a crashing noise. The plastic on the 47th Street side of the uncompleted freight terminal took two heavy blows and fell to the ground.

  Taylor spoke to Jansen as he passed. “Who are the Street Sweepers?”