Manhattan Is My Beat

Freeze-frame: His mouth.

"We going to be safe?" he whispered.

"Sure," Rune whispered. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and handed him the small, crinkly square of plastic.

"Actually," he said, "I meant because we're twenty feet in the air."

"Don't worry," Rune whispered. "I'll hold you real tight. I won't let you fall."

Freeze-frame: She wrapped her arms around him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"I don't howl."

In the loft Sandra was putting explosive red polish on her toenails. She continued sourly. "That was the deal. Remember? I don't howl when I'm in bed with a guy and you clean up after yourself."

She nodded at the mess Rune had made when she was frantically packing. "I have somebody over, I'm quiet as a mouse. He howls, there's nothing I can do about it. But me, I ask you, am I quiet, or what?"

"You're quiet." Rune bent over and picked up clothes, swept up the broken glass.

"Do I howl?"

"You don't howl."

"So where were you last night?" Sandra asked.

"We went to a junkyard."

"Brother, that boy's got a way to go." Sandra glanced up from her artistic nails, examined Rune critically. "You look happy. Got lucky, huh?"

"Didn't your mother teach you not to pry?"

"No, my mother's the one who taught me how to pry. So, you get lucky?"

Rune ignored her and repacked her clothes, put the books back on the shelf.

She paused. On the floor beside the bookcase was the shattered cassette of Manhattan Is My Beat. Rune picked it up. The loops of opaque tape hung out of the broken plastic reels. She looked at it for a moment. She was thinking of Robert Kelly. Of the movie. About the million dollars of bank loot that was never really there-never there for her to find anyway.

She tossed the cassette into the trash bin. Then glanced at Sandra's side of the loft. She picked up the good-bye note she'd written to her roommate. It was unopened. "Don't you read your mail?" she asked.

The woman glanced at it. "Whatsit? A love note?"

"From me."

"What's it say?"

"Nothing." Rune threw it out too. Then she flopped down on her pillows, staring into the blue-and-white sky. She remembered the clouds in New Jersey floating over the trimmed grounds of the nursing home as she crouched next to Raoul Elliott's wheelchair. They'd seemed like dragons and giants then, the clouds. She stared at them for a long time now. After the horror of the last few days she expected them to look merely like clouds. But, no, they still seemed like dragons and giants.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

An expression of her father's.

She thought about the old screenwriter, Raoul Elliott. Next week she'd go out and visit him again. Bring him another flower. And maybe a book. She could read to him. Stories are the best, he'd said. Rune agreed with him there.

Five minutes later Sandra said, "Shit. I forget. Some geek from that place you work, or used to work, the video store? Looked like a heavy-metal wa

"Frankie?"

"1 don't know. Maybe. He came by with a couple of messages." She read a slip of paper. "One was from this Amanda LeClerc. He said he couldn't understand her too good. She's, like, foreign and he was saying if they come to this country why don't they learn to speak-a the language."

"The point, Sandra?"

"So this Amanda person, she called and said she'd heard from this priest or minister or somebody in Brooklyn…" Sandra, juggling the nail polish, smoothed the wrinkled note.

Rune sat up.

A minister?

Sandra was struggling to read. "Like, I'm really not programmed to be a message center, you know. Yeah, okay. I got it. She said she talked to this minister and he's got this suitcase. It was somebody's named Robert Kelly's."

A suitcase?

"And he doesn't know what to do with it, the minister. But he said it's, like, very important."

Rune screamed, "Yes!" She rolled on her back, and her legs, straight up in the air, kicked back and forth.

"Whoa, take a pill or something." Sandra handed her the message.

She read it. St. Xavier's Church on Atlantic Avenue. Brooklyn.

"Oh, and here's the other one." She found another slip in her purse.

It was from Stephanie. She was out of the hospital and feeling a lot better. She'd stop by later.

"All right!" Rune cried.

"I'm glad somebody's happy." Sandra added, "I'm depressed. Not that anybody cares." She continued to paint her nails carefully.

"I've got to call Richard. We're taking a trip."

"Where?"

"Brooklyn!"

"Old folks homes, junkyards… Why am I not surprised? Hey, don't hug me! Watch the polish!"

Rune got Richard at home.

This was weird. It was the afternoon. What was he doing home?

She realized that he hadn't told her exactly where he wrote his boring meet-your-CEO scripts.

Rune was on the street, calling from the pay phone. "Hey, how come you're home? I thought you worked for a company. With what's her name? Too-tall Karen?"

He laughed again. "I do mostly freelance. I'm sort of an independent contractor."

"We need to go to Brooklyn. A church on Atlantic Avenue. Can you drive?"

He said, "You're home now?"

"I'm in my office."

"Office?" he asked.

"My exterior office."

"Oh." He laughed. "A pay phone."

"So, can we go?"

"What's going on in Brooklyn?"

She told him about the minister's message, then added, "I just called him-the priest Amanda found.

I sort of told him a white lie."

"Which was?"

"That I'm Robert Kelly's granddaughter."

"That's not a white lie. It's a full-fledged lie. Especially to a man of the cloth. You oughta be ashamed. Anyway, I thought you were going to forget about the money."

"I did. Forgot completely. It was him called me." She persisted. Said that Mr. Kelly'd been living in a home attached to the church until he found an apartment. And that he'd left a suitcase with the minister for safekeeping. He didn't want to carry it around until he was settled. It was-are you listening? He said it was too valuable to him to just carry around the streets of the city."

Another pause.

"It's too crazy," Richard said.

She added, "And get this. I asked him if there was a cemetery nearby-like in the movie Manhattan Is My Beat. See, Dana Mitchell, the cop, buries the money in a new grave. And there is!"

"Is what?"

"A cemetery. Next to the church. Don't you see? Mr. Elliott told Mr. Kelly about the church and Mr. Kelly went there and dug up the money."

"Okay," he said dubiously. Then he asked, "You're at your loft?"

"Will be in five minutes."

He said seductively, "You going to be by yourself?"

"Sandra's there."

"Bummer. Can't you send her out to buy something?"

"How 'bout we go to Brooklyn now. Then we'll think about some privacy."

"I'm on my way."

Rune reached the stop of the stairs in her loft and stopped.

"Stephanie!"

The redhead smiled wanly. She sat in Rune's half of the loft, on a pile of pillows. She was pale-paler than usual-and she wore a scarf that partially covered a bruise on her neck. There was also large bandage on her temple and an eggplant-colored mark on her cheek.

"Ohmygod," Rune blurted out, examining her. "You do bruise, don't you?" She hugged the woman carefully. "You look, well…"

"I look awful. You can say it."

"Not for somebody who got run over by a cab."

"Hey, there's a compliment for you."