Westside Saints, page 3
“It’s funny,” she said, “really, she did almost nothing at all.”
“Very impressive.”
Now Stacey laughed, a sound as clear and untroubled as church bells on Sunday morning, and it occurred to me that maybe I was the fool in the room.
“She prayed with me, sang hymns, but mostly we talked. After that, I could sleep.”
“Did she show you the finger of Saint Róisín?”
“She knew I needed help, not mystery. She lost her husband so long ago, but she believes that someday he will come back to her. She helped me believe it, too.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“Is it now?”
“Even children know it, Miss Tarbell, so I’ll say it simple, like I’m speaking to a child. People don’t come back from the dead.”
“One man did, once.”
“Maybe. But that was some time ago.”
“In a city where water springs up from concrete and trees grow taller than the spire of Trinity Church, why couldn’t it happen again?”
This woman’s skin was thin enough that I could see her skull. Her smile was as fragile as bone china. I felt an urge to shatter her. Instead I excused myself and stepped into the long hallway, dabbing my forehead with my wrist, wondering how anyone could be taken in by such idiocy. A Westsider should know better. The dead do not return; grief does not subside. Our memories fade, until those we loved are no more real than paper saints on a wall.
“How are you finding the winter?” I heard Lamb ask her.
“It’s hard without Tom. But Van Alen’s guards bring food and coal, and the life insurance money should come through soon. When I get that check, I’ll be going back to Ireland and sailing in style.”
When he emerged from her room, I was already halfway down the hallway, making for the short flight of icy steps that led back to the tundra of Seventh Avenue. When Lamb caught up with me, he grabbed me by the elbow hard enough that I had to work not to slip.
“You should have some goddamned sympathy,” he said. “That woman’s hurting and you made fun.”
“We all hurt. That’s no excuse for her wasting my time.”
“Since when does the detective of tiny mysteries care about wasting time?”
We walked down to Sixth Avenue, him grumbling about the transformative nature of faith, of prayer, of understanding, and me trying to understand why an impoverished widow’s simple story had driven me so quickly to rage. In the shadow of Jefferson Market Court, whose multicolored shingles rose like a rainbow over the rank snow, I tried to atone.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. “It was rude to point out that what she believes is stupid.”
“That’s a pathetic apology.”
“Right now, pathetic is the best I can muster. This case has worn me thin.”
“The next time you run out of ideas, bother someone else.”
“Any suggestions?”
He pointed south. Past the snow, past the refuse, past the broken buildings and a half mile of buckled sidewalk, towering white trees bent against the wind.
“You want to understand the Byrds?” he said. “Get ’em to take you in there. Take a look at their first church. Make ’em tell you about the day their baby brother died.”
The year the fence went up, pines sprouted on the south side of Houston. They hurled themselves through warehouses and shops, obliterating some buildings and swallowing others, absorbing bricks, concrete, and steel into a tapestry of pale wood. Today, this blank spot on city maps runs from Houston to Canal, from Sixth Avenue all the way to the fence. Nowhere on the Westside are the trees as thick, the shadows as dark, the roads as twisted. It is an insane place, and Judy and Enoch Byrd would serve as my guides. They hadn’t wanted to come back here, but when I threatened to quit their case unless they gave me the tour I required, their mother ordered them to do as I asked. What a useful ally mothers can be.
The trees of the Thicket were evergreen, their branches thick enough to crowd out the sky. I walked slowly, watching every step, but Judy and Enoch strolled through the rough landscape like it was a fresh paved road. The path that had been West Broadway wound through monstrous vegetation and crumbled masonry. One building had been entirely overwhelmed by trees and vines, leaving a vegetative facsimile of the original structure in its place. Another had vanished completely, save for a network of copper pipes that stretched from the earth to the heights of the ramrod-straight trees.
“How long has it been since you lived here?” I said.
“We moved to Carmine Street after the fire,” said Judy. “But I like the Thicket. It’s a strange place to know your way around.”
Our road dipped into a hollow and rose straight through a building, which had a gap in it as clear as a machine-bored hole. Branches rattled, small feet scuttled, and I felt the presence of tiny heartbeats and animal eyes. I had already lost track of how long we’d been walking, but the Byrds marched on. For the first time, I simply had to trust them. I was surprised by how natural it felt.
Finally, we came to a slouching archway and a pair of cross-shaped windows: the remains of Bulrush Byrd’s original Electric Church. Beyond was a flat, snowy plain with an altar at the far end.
“You’ve seen it,” said Enoch. “Let’s go.”
“I didn’t come to gawk from the sidewalk. I need the whole tour, and the history, too.”
“Mam didn’t say anything about letting you inside. That’s holy ground.”
“I’ll take her,” said Judy.
“But she isn’t family.”
“I know, brother. But sometimes it’s easier to just not care.”
That’s a fine credo, I thought as I followed her across the threshold. The walk had warmed me up, but I felt a renewed chill when I passed beneath the stone. Judy led me the length of the nave, hands stretched out to brush the backs of long-gone pews.
“Was it a grand church?” I said.
“Hardly more than a storefront. But Bully had the spirit, and that’ll make any building feel like a cathedral.”
“What did he preach?”
“The electric resurrection,” she said with a sad flourish. “The miracle of miracles—that the gates of heaven would open, and our dead would come back to meet us. But really, he preached love.”
The electric resurrection. For a few years in the late ’80s, it was a sensation. I’d dug through old newspapers and found reports that Bully was a blessed speaker, able to make every sinner in the room feel he was bringing them the word of God fresh from the well. He preached to a packed house three times a day and was on the verge of launching what one Christian newsletter called “a major national movement” when his church was destroyed.
“Your brother won’t talk about the fire,” I said.
“No.”
“Will you?”
She crouched, plunged her hands through the snow, and felt that holy ground. I didn’t expect her to give me much, but I’d pieced together most of the story already. In March 1888, Bully Byrd promised the city a miracle. He had devised a ritual, he told his flock, that would call home the dead. The electric resurrection was at hand, and it would remake the world.
Hundreds crowded into his little storefront to watch their prophet work. Standing in a spotless white suit, he stoked a roaring fire inside a bronze brazier, mumbled some Latin, and hurled in a fistful of powder.
A jet of flame shot up.
The tapestries on the ceiling caught fire.
The blaze spread fast, but Bully kept his flock from panic. He led them out, single file, no one pushing, and nearly everyone was safe on the street when the children downstairs began to scream.
“What were you doing in the basement?” I said.
“Papa didn’t believe in forcing children to sit through services. There was a playroom downstairs where Ruth and I watched the young ones. That day the back entrance was locked, but Ruth had a key and we went in anyway, with a few of the kids from the neighborhood. By the time we smelled smoke, the stairs were mostly flame.”
As his church burned, Bully went back inside. He got the children out—as many as he could.
“The littlest were eating lunch,” said Judy, “in high chairs. He took us, and he was going to come back for the youngest, but the fire was too high and the crowd held him back. Some of those babes knew how to walk. They could have gotten out. But they were strapped in tight, and they burned.”
There were four who died, all under age three. One was Bully’s youngest son, Barnabas. He loved sailboats, the Sentinel archives had the cruelty to inform me, and drawing angels. Bully was hailed as a hero. Two days later, he disappeared.
Out on the sidewalk, Enoch stared at the ground, twisting his foot in the snow like a boy who didn’t understand why his brother and father will never come home.
“The finger saved us,” said Judy, flicking her cigarette at the trees. “That was the year of the blizzard—it was like the whole city had slipped into some white hell. Me, fresh from Haiti, I’d never seen anything like it. Mam didn’t know what to do without Papa, without the church. When spring came and the snow melted, we came here and found Róisín’s finger on the altar.”
“Who put it there?”
“God.”
I made a face. She ignored it, which is usually the best thing to do with my face, and went on.
“We rebuilt the ministry around it,” she said. “We survived.”
“I’d like to see where it appeared.”
“Go. I’ll check on Enoch. Tenderhearted boy. Mam shouldn’t have made him come.”
She left me behind and I walked on to inspect the rough pile of half-buried stone. There I found the strange drift of snow and the body of the redheaded man. It was only a vagrant, I told myself. No one could get killed over a missing finger. His mystery was not mine.
As we walked out of the Thicket, I hung a few feet behind. Part of me still doubted the Byrds could be as innocent as they appeared. Part of me always doubts. That is the part that thrills at the sight of a murdered man, that relishes questions whose answers can be fatal. That is the part I wish I could silence forever.
“When was the last time you came by the church?” I said, seeing the blood, the red hair, the skin frozen and cracked.
“Years ago,” said Enoch.
“Does anyone ever come here?”
“No one in the family,” said Judy. “But there are people who live in the Thicket, and people who pass through. Why?”
We stepped onto Houston Street, where the trees stopped as sharply as a sentence. The wind blew in icy from the Hudson. Clouds hid the stars.
“I’ve spent a week and a half on this case,” I said. “I’ve heard nothing but good things about you and your family. I’ve turned up no trace of the finger, no sign that anyone would do you harm.”
“So?” said Judy.
“This is the Westside. No one is so pure. Everyone has enemies.”
Judy looked at her brother, asking permission to say something she had been trying to keep to herself.
“It’s not right,” said Enoch. “He’s family.”
“He’s a scoundrel.”
“Still.”
“Who?” I said.
And she told me about her other brother.
The Basement Club went on forever. The bar ran the length of the room; the earth floor was studded with melted snow, vomit, and blood. Built in a pit where a Bleecker Street apartment house used to be, it was below street level and had a low ceiling of irregular boards that kept out snow but let in damp. Rubber hoses snaked out of the bar at one-foot intervals. Drop a nickel in the slot and out slid a trickle of gin to be caught with a cup, if the patron brought one, or a mouth. A tangle of machinery ran the length of the place, whirring and clanging as the poison poured. There was no music, no talk, no chairs—just the cheapest drunk on the Westside. It was fiendishly popular.
Judy and Enoch left me at the door, proving that there were places of sin too filthy even for them. I entered through a turnstile that shot a ticket into my palm, which told me I was the seventy-third patron of the night.
I paid my nickel and cupped my palms under the hose, slurping up whatever didn’t run through my fingers. I wiped my hands on the patron to my left, who was glassy with drink, his mouth stained bloody by the beet red liquor. The bartender surveyed his automated gin mill from a high chair, a lifeguard ignoring an ocean of drowning men. After several minutes’ concentrated effort, and another few mouthfuls of gin, I caught his eye.
He was short and broad, with bushy hair and a nose like a ball of cookie dough squashed flat. His candy-striped uniform was a dizzying mess of black and green. On his chest was a wrinkled slip of paper, held with safety pins, that read “64.” He smoothed it with his wrist as he climbed down from his perch and walked my way. His name was Abner Byrd.
“He’s a scourge,” Judy had said. “I’m sorry, brother, but it’s true. Walked out on us when he was sixteen, and he’s spent the last thirty years sinking deeper and deeper into sin. Doesn’t speak to us except once or twice a year, when he crashes into the church, blind drunk, to scream that there is no god but death.”
“He is a difficult case,” admitted Enoch. “But God would ask us to forgive.”
“I’ll forgive when he gives us the finger back. He’s the only rat on the Westside low enough to steal it. He’d do it just to watch us cry.”
As I looked Abner in the face now, I wondered if that was true. The prodigal Byrd leaned on the bar and spoke, sleepy and slow.
“Trouble with the tube?” he said. “Sometimes a roach’ll die in there and it’ll get plugged. Let me get the pipe cleaner.”
“The gin flows free.”
“Then why the eye?”
“I’m looking for the finger of Saint Róisín.”
I flicked out a card that read g. carr: tiny mysteries solved. It landed in a puddle of gin on the bar and soaked up the liquor thirstily. Abner glanced at the panel of smoked glass mounted above the bar. A bell rang.
“I’m on the clock,” he said.
“Your siblings think you took it.”
He stalked mechanically down the bar, clearing each tube with a swift jerk, smacking awake any sleeping drunk and telling him to buy another round or get out. I followed him, calling questions from across the trench.
“But why?” I said. “A pickled finger’s worth nothing. All it does is hurt your family, and why would you wound such fine people?”
“If you’re not drinking, you need to leave.”
I dropped another nickel and refilled my mouth. I swallowed without gagging and kept my eyes locked with his. He did not look like the vicious bastard Judy had painted. He was just another flop scrambling to hang on.
“Where were you on the night of the twenty-third?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
The bell rang, then rang again.
“What’s that bell?” I said.
“My timekeeper. Behind the glass. Adjusting my rating. I’m only a 64. If I fall any further . . .”
“Did you take it?”
“No!”
“Can you prove it?”
He marched down the bar on that windup-toy gait, past glass so dark it was impossible to see what the timekeeper was doing or if he was even there. He came back with a fat ledger, which he dropped on the bar, taking care to keep it away from the gin.
“The twenty-third?” he said, opening to the most detailed time sheet I had ever seen. “What time?”
“Between dark and dawn.”
“I was here. I’m always here. More specific? From 6 to 6:07, I’m in the chair. 6:08 to 6:22, I’m greasing the mechanism. 6:23 to 6:34, I’m fighting with that fat bastard at the end of the bar about how he can’t bring food in here. 6:35 to—”
“I understand.”
“I’ve had a lot of bad jobs,” he said. “Sweeping floors. Hauling trash. This is the only place ever left me feeling less than human.”
The bell rang three times, then a fourth, then a fifth.
“Oh, hell,” said Abner, his puffy face suddenly oozing sweat. “Hell, hell, goddamn it to hell.”
Abner slammed the ledger and rumbled off in an imitation of running. The bell rang faster and sharper until it was one long tone. The patrons responded with a dull, animal roar. I launched myself across the deep wood. One of the gin swillers tried to drag me back, but I loosened his grip with a kick to the jaw. I ran after Abner. He threw open a panel on the far wall, gripped a smooth wooden crank, and whipped it around with all the speed he could muster. The drunks cheered him on.
“Why does Judy hate you?” I said.
“Why do you care?” he panted, his arms churning.
“Because their movement is dead, but they open that church every morning, they preach, they fight sin on every corner of a district that gets more evil every year. I care because I need to know—why do they bother? Why do they still believe?”
He bent himself double and, with a final thrust, drove the crank home. All the machinery came alive, groaning and screaming toward some impossible task. Abner wiped his brow and checked his watch. Only when he saw the time did he permit himself to breathe.
“If they’re so sure I took that goddamned digit,” he said, “why aren’t they here to say so?”
“It’s not their kind of place.”
“That’s a lie, and probably not the first they told you. Only reason Judy and Enoch don’t do their act here is ’cause the Gray Boys pay them twenty bucks a month to stay away.”
“Who are the Gray Boys?”
“The Eastside crowd that runs this place. That’s just what I call them—I don’t know their right name, or if they even have one. I just know they’re gray, and as interchangeable as all the parts in this damn machine.”
“Van Alen wouldn’t stand for an Eastside gang in the Lower West.”
“Van Alen might not have a choice.”
That stopped me short. I hadn’t heard of anyone tough or stupid enough to challenge Van Alen’s grip on the Westside. I chewed on that as the bell continued to keen. When the noise was nearly unbearable, the machinery stopped, the ringing quieted, and the crowd fell into a seething hush. Abner put his hand against the wall. A metal chip fell out of the slot.
