A Manhattan Ghost Story (12 page)

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello, Abner.” Her voice had the same slight raspiness that it had the first time we’d made love.

“Care to tell me where you’ve been?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“No.” I paused. “Not really.”

She stayed in the doorway. She looked for all the world like a whore, which didn’t bother me. I asked, matter-of-factly, “Who are you?”

And she asked again, “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I am who I told you I am,” she said.

The odor of damp wood was in the room, and it was much stronger than I remembered, much more offensive.

She repeated. “I am who I told you I am. I’m Phyllis Pellaprat.”

“Phyllis Pellaprat is dead.”

She came into the room, let her coat slide to the floor. “Well, then,” she said, “that’s her burden, isn’t it, Abner?” And she quickly and gracefully slipped her boots and dress off. She was naked beneath the dress. She came over to the side of the bed. In the semi-darkness I saw her glance at her breasts and nod. “Touch me, Abner. Please touch me.”

The odor of damp wood assaulted me. I turned my head away. She laughed. It was a quick, humorless noise, as if she were imitating laughter and doing a poor job of it. She stopped laughing. “You won’t like it out there, Abner.”

I looked back. I said nothing. I was confused. And I think that, for the first time since I’d known her, I was scared, too.

She stepped backward, toward the window, so she was facing me and so her body was well-illuminated.

“You won’t like it out there, Abner,” she repeated. She made her arms very straight, held her hands flat against her thighs, and locked her knees so her legs were stiff. Then she closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly and drew her lips back so they pointed at the base of her ears. It was not a smile. It was more a kind of hard and joyless grin.

I managed, “Phyllis?”

Her mouth dropped open an inch. A white, pasty substance appeared at the edges of her lips. I said again, “Phyllis?” and swung my feet to the floor, stood, took several steps toward her. I put my hands on her waist. It was a desperate gesture. Her skin felt like tepid water; the odor of damp wood was heavy and cloying about her.

And suddenly I felt alone in that room, and I took my hands from her and stepped back, and tried to say her name once more, but it came out as a scream that caromed shrilly off the walls.

Her eyelids popped open. Her eyes rolled upward in their sockets.

I heard a long, low, rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.

But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her. I loved her as I have loved no one else.

And that’s why I came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close.

For what might have been hours.

Until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise come from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech: “You won’t like it out there, Abner.”

“I love you, Phyllis.”

“Of course you do.”

She pushed me gently backwards, toward the bed, and said this, her voice low and husky and playful: “I’m sure a fucking horny bitch, aren’t I?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

And when I think of a ghost story, I think about children shivering around a campfire while an aging man with a long, austere face summons up—in resonant, wonderfully spectral tones—the way the misdeeds of the dead will soon be visited upon the living, and I think about old, gray houses that have somehow had Evil implanted in them, and I think about rocking chairs that rock all on their own, and about crying in empty rooms, about cold spots, warm spots, hot spots, hounds out of hell, men who hang themselves in attics, and in cellars, again and again and again.

And it’s all true.

I
know
that it’s all true.

But there’s a shitload more going on over there, over on the Other Side, than any of us can imagine.

And some of it’s very interesting, very entertaining, but some of it smells bad—some of it stinks, in fact—and if you tried to put your finger on it, if you tried to pin it down and say
, yes, definitely, this is what it’s all about, this is what Death is all about; sit back now, I’ll tell you
, my God, they’d swarm all over you like angry bees, the dead would, like angry bees.

Phyllis left before dawn. She got quietly into her green dress and her fake mink coat, her stacked high-heel boots, and as I watched from the bed, she walked to the bedroom doorway and said, with her back to me, “I love you, Abner. Please love me.” And then she left. It was a routine that I didn’t understand, but I was growing to trust it, to believe in it. So I didn’t get out of the bed and go after her. I said, to myself, “I do love you, Phyllis.”

I fell asleep quickly.

The phone on a little table beside the bed rang at a quarter past nine. I cursed it, answered it. “Yes?” I said.

“Abner?” It was Jocelyn Horn.

“Hello, Jocelyn.”

“Did I wake you, Abner? I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s okay.”

“Stacy is in New York, Abner.”

I could have told her that I knew that, but I realized that it had probably taken a great force of will for her to call me, and I didn’t want to puncture whatever good feelings that gave her, so I said, “Where in New York?”

“At a hotel called the Algonquin.”

“Thank you, Aunt Jocelyn.”

“It’s okay, Abner. I
do
like you. Just,
please
—be careful!”

“Yes, Aunt Jocelyn, I’m always careful.”

“Jesus, no, you aren’t!” she whispered, as if to herself. Then she hung up.

“Be careful!” is something that Jocelyn Horn has been saying to me all my life. She said it to me for the first time when I was two months old, lying naked on my back on a changing table, while she was leaning over me, giving me a change of diapers. “Be careful you don’t pee in your own face, Abner,” she said. So I peed in
her
face. My mother told me that story a couple of years before she died, when I was fourteen or so and she thought I could handle the whole thing. I told her I thought it was a good story, a funny story, but when I repeated it to Jocelyn herself some time later, she grimaced and looked offended. Jocelyn’s not an easy woman to figure out.

I got dressed—jeans, a red flannel shirt, sneakers, the wool-lined denim jacket—got my Nikon F. and went out for breakfast to the same Greek restaurant I’d gone to a week earlier. I sat at the same table, ordered the same food—scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee—and ate slowly because I was trying to figure out what I was going to do
after
breakfast. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to work. I was supposed to get started, at last, on the big, coffee-table photo book that I’d been given several thousand dollars to start. It was why I’d come to New York in the first place.

I finished breakfast quicker than I’d hoped, ordered some more coffee, did some more thinking. I started thinking that New York was not only the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station, the U.N., the West Village; it was Harlem, too. More specifically, it was the area around East 95th Street. So I checked the Nikon, found that it was loaded with Tri-X pan, that I had three more rolls of it in my jacket pocket, took a last sip of coffee, and watched as a big, brown roach scooted across the top of the table and disappeared around the underside. I leaned over. The roach had stopped a couple of inches beyond the underside edge of the table; its little antennae were going this way and that. I straightened, reflexively lifted my knee into the roach, heard it crack, heard a dull snapping sound as it hit the grimy tile floor. It came to me that I’d done exactly the same thing on my last visit to that restaurant.

I heard, from my right, “Pardon me.” I looked. A man in a stiff, gray suit and a bulky, black overcoat was standing beside the table. He was middle-aged, with a wide, flat face and dull, gray eyes, and he was trying to smile, though he was not very convincing about it.

 “Yes?” I said.

“My name is Kennedy Whelan,” he said. “I’m looking for your friend, Art DeGraff. Do you think you could help me?” His smile broadened; he had nicotine stains, like liver spots, on his teeth.

“Art’s in Nice,” I said.

The man’s smile became lopsided. He shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid that’s incorrect, Mr. Cray.”

“How do you know my name?”

He ignored that. “Your friend is
here
, in Manhattan.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“We believe he’s in Harlem, as a matter of fact.”

“We?”

He pulled a shield out of his jacket pocket, flashed it, put it back. “I’m with the NYPD, 22nd Precinct, Homicide Division.”

“Uh-huh.” I stood. The man was not as tall as I, a good five inches shorter, in fact, but at least thirty pounds heavier, and that intimidated me. I said, looking down at him, “If I could help you, Mr. Whelan, I would, but I can’t, I really can’t; now, if you’ll excuse me—”

He put his hand firmly on my arm. “When was the last time you heard from Mr. DeGraff, please?”

I sighed, as if losing my patience. “I heard from him two days ago. He called me. From Nice.”

“And what did he tell you, please?”

I considered a moment. I thought it was likely that Art’s phone was tapped and that, if I lied, Whelan would know. I decided to tell the truth. “He told me that he had killed someone. A woman. He told me it was an accident, but that the police were looking for him and that he would probably be home early, before May—I’m subletting his apartment …”

“Yes, I know,” Whelan cut in. His smile reappeared; it was genuine now. “Thank you.” He nodded to his right, to indicate the door. “You can run along.”

I sighed again; he let go of my arm. I asked, “Is Art’s phone tapped?”

“That’s restricted information, Mr. Cray.” He sat at the table I’d used, shrugged out of his coat, looked up at me. “Thank you, Mr. Cray. We’ll talk again, I’m sure.”

“Believe me, Mr. Whelan,” I said, my voice rising in pitch because I was nervous, “if I could help you, I would. That’s the truth.”

“Of course it’s the truth, Mr. Cray.” He picked up a menu, started glancing over it. I watched him a moment, decided he was playing games with me, shrugged, and left the restaurant.

Understand that I
was
concerned for Art, he was a friend—hell, he had been a very close friend at one time—and I did not like the idea that the police were looking for him. I liked the idea even less that he had actually killed someone, that her name had been Phyllis Pellaprat, and that there seemed to be some strong connection between her and the woman I’d fallen in love with. I had no idea what that connection was. The woman in the snapshot over the fireplace was indeed the woman I’d been sharing the apartment with. But I’m a photographer, so I know that photographs are not always truth-telling (“But they are fairly
true
illusions, Mr. Pelleprat.” … “Yes, like our crumb cake.”), and despite her eccentricities and her odd comings and goings, I did not believe for an instant that the woman I knew as Phyllis Pellaprat was the woman that my friend Art DeGraff had beaten to death in December.

No. That’s a lie.

It was snowing lightly when I got to the building that Phyllis had taken me to for an evening with her parents. I stood out in front of it, near the street, put a wide-angle lens on the Nikon, focused, took several shots from various angles. I was pretending to work, and I wasn’t even fooling myself. I packed the Nikon away, went up the crumbling concrete steps to the front doors of the building, tried to pull them open, found that they were locked. I put my face to the glass in the doors, peered in, saw pretty much what I had seen with Phyllis—a telephone booth sans telephone, several overstuffed chairs, a set of elevators, doors wide-open. I straightened, stepped backward a few feet, looked up at what I assumed were the windows of Apartment 506, the Pellaprats’ apartment. I saw that one of the windows had been smashed and a sheet of plywood installed on the inside.

“Shit!” I whispered, because I was certain I was at the wrong building.

 “You want somethin’ in there, my man?!” I heard from behind me.

I glanced around. I saw a black man—in his early twenties, I guessed—dressed in a battered, grayish-brown winter jacket and shiny blue pants and black rubber, buckle boots, unbuckled. He had the unlighted stub of a cigarette stuck between his lips, and when he talked, it bobbed up and down in time with his words. He went on, “I mean you.” He didn’t move much. He had his hands in his jacket pockets and his elbows hard to his sides, his shoulders up. He looked very cold.

“I was looking for someone,” I told him, and smiled. I nodded at the building. “Her parents live here, I think.”

“Only people livin’ in there is junkies, my man, and half of ‘em is dead, so why don’tchoo go back where you come from.”

“Yes,” I said, and started down the steps toward him, “I will.”

He nodded once at the camera. “An’ you can give me that before you go, okay?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.” I was halfway down the steps, and he was near the street. I turned right, so I was moving away from him. He came forward, stiffly. I glanced back, saw his left hand move in his jacket pocket, as if he were clenching something.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said.

“I’m right behind ya,” he said.

“I was just looking for someone, that’s all.”

 “Well, you found him,” he said. He was keeping his legs straight as he walked, as if his knees were locked. I realized that I could easily outrun him, if I needed. I turned my head, walked faster. The light snow had grown heavier in the last few minutes; a half-inch or so had accumulated on the sidewalk, and my feet were making slight crunching noises on it.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, thinking that I sounded foolish. I heard nothing. I turned my head, looked back. The man was once again in front of the Pellaprats’ building. He was facing it, his feet were moving slightly in the snow, and he was talking to himself, apparently, because I could see the stub of the cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips.