Across the way, separating herself from the homebound pedestrians, he saw Miranda, as he knew that he would. Just as he had seen her the last time he had sat at this bus stop holding this same letter, just as he had seen her a thousand times over in his memory, his dreams; his nightmares. It was as if he had returned to 1977 to witness, and relive, this moment. Graham was a few yards behind her, as he always was, unable to keep up with her furious pace. He appeared both annoyed and concerned. They both looked exactly the same... exactly as they must.
Miranda was disheveled, her blond hair knotted, unkempt, her face white and streaked with misapplied makeup, rigid and masklike, her plum-colored peasant dress thrashing about her booted ankles. People made way for her as she strode along swinging a bunch of keys like a demented bell ringer.
She looked as she sometimes did when she and Jimmy pulled all-nighters drinking her favorite cognac; doing the lines of coke he brought her like offerings — a perk of his outlaw profession, and a moneymaker among her theater friends. Miranda and he had become indispensable guests at every cast party and theatrical bar in Manhattan. Staggering home at dawn, they had made love to the sounds of the workday traffic rising from the streets below; afterwards collapsing into comalike sleeps.
The only dark spot on their happiness had been Graham’s frequent appearances at these same bars and parties, watching them from across the crowded rooms through his rose-tinted lenses. Sometimes Jimmy would find Miranda huddled with the little man in some distant corner of their latest haunt, her expression concerned and strained-looking. Once, he had come upon them just as Graham seized one of Miranda’s long, thin arms in his soft-looking hands, shouting something Jimmy couldn’t make out over the noise in the room. Jimmy had knocked him down, and would have done worse but for Miranda’s pleas.
“He’s still my manager,” she had explained tearfully, as the smaller man, ignoring his bleeding lip, attempted to right his toupee. “And when I first got to New York he was my only friend. I can’t just ignore him!”
Jimmy had said she should get another manager... there must be plenty around.
She had answered, “You don’t understand... it’s not that simple. He’s just trying to help in his own way.”
Across the street, the phantoms drew closer, and Jimmy stood, the tension in his body drawing him upright despite the fact that what he was witnessing had occurred decades before.
She swept past the tottering doorman, shouting to him and pointing back at Graham, then disappearing into the lobby. Graham arrived moments later, the doorman staggering after him as he brushed past, arms flapping in loose, helpless gestures.
Jimmy looked up to the seventh floor now. After a few minutes, the lights of Miranda’s apartment began to come on, room by room. Straining his already smarting eyes, he could see the flash of yellow hair that signaled she was inside. Passing each of the front windows of her large apartment, she switched on light after light in rapid succession. He could not see Graham, but knew he must be near.
The crowds were thinning as actual night set in. Her rooms glowed warmly, reminding Jimmy with actual pain of the many nights he had spent there in her arms, of the songs she sang to him sometimes, sitting up in bed, her small, pert breasts carelessly exposed, accompanying herself on guitar.
She sang with a clear, strong voice that carried within it notes of wild, unbridled exuberance, as well as echoes of something dark and troubling. It was within this singing that he sensed something more than the beloved little sister, the good daughter, the best friend she portrayed on her daytime-television drama.
There had been something in her childhood, something hidden... She didn’t offer it up to him, and he had been afraid to ask... to know. Yet it seemed of a piece with her relationship with the older Graham somehow.
He struggled to see into the rooms above him — already despising himself for not rushing across the street, forcing his way into her apartment — stopping what he knew was coming.
Just as the lights had come on one by one, they began to be extinguished in the same manner. He would catch glimpses of Miranda’s blond hair as she flashed past an unshaded window only to vanish in shadow.
But even as the last room went dark, the process was reversed once more. Like a windup toy, its springs too tightly ratcheted, Miranda uncoiled at an ever more frantic pace, the glimpse of yellow hair no longer accompanied by the shade of her dress, but a peek of bare flesh, a naked shoulder.
She hurtled ever faster from room to room.
Jimmy felt his mouth going dry, the skin beneath his heavy clothing pebbling in dread and terror.
In the last room to be reilluminated she appeared from the waist up in the large window, throwing it open. It was clear now she had shed her clothes, was naked. She turned, and once more lights winked out in rapid progression until she reached the far end of the apartment. For several seconds there was just the darkness, Jimmy unable to take his eyes from the open, waiting window.
Then something white flashed through into the chill night above the cracked pavement, the oily asphalt. With the verve of a high diver, Miranda launched herself into the dark with terrifying lust, the arc of her descent a long, angry scream; the sound of her striking the pavement an organic concussion expressing something so profound, so tragic, so final that Jimmy could neither grasp nor ever forget it.
When he had finally been able to move his feet that day nearly forty years before, he had raced into the street only to be struck down by a taxi, awakening in the same hospital to which Miranda’s lifeless body had been taken. By the time he had recovered from a broken leg, multiple contusions, and a fractured skull, she had already been autopsied, the D.A.’s office ruling her death a suicide and allowing her body to be transported back to Colorado. Jimmy was unable to attend the funeral in that foreign place.
Still, he mourned... and remembered.
His drinking grew worse, and the following year he went too far in dealing with a deadbeat, a sad little gambler who had fallen on such hard times that he could only secure a loan from the Westies. Never recovering from the beating-induced coma, the gambler had died, and Jimmy was sent up for his first serious hitch. When he was released in the mid eighties, the Westies were no more, the Feds having brought them down and scattered their remains across the tri-state area.
Jimmy took up residence in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making use of his ties and reputation to join up with the Keighry Head mob there. They were small potatoes compared to the Westies, but Irish-American gangsters were thin on the ground, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Having been sent up again for his role in exporting stolen luxury cars, he had served twelve years. It could have been less had he agreed to testify against the others involved in the scheme. He had taken his lumps instead and was now free once more. Sixty-one and tired, Jimmy felt as if he had satisfied all remaining requirements expected of him... save one.
This time he looked both ways before crossing the street.
Jimmy could see that the doorman didn’t like his looks, but he called upstairs anyway, never taking his eyes off the shabby intruder as he murmured into the phone.
If Graham declined to admit him, Jimmy intended to go up regardless. He knew his way to the apartment and would hurt the doorman if he must. He ran his thick fingers over the little Walther.380 nestled at the bottom of his coat pocket.
“Go ahead on up, sir,” the younger man said, returning the phone to its cradle. He looked relieved. “It’s number...”
“I know what number it is,” Jimmy cut him off, turning for the elevator. His voice sounded hoarse, unused; even to his own ears. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually had a conversation with anyone.