New York Echoes 2 Read online

  Praise for Warren Adler’s Fiona Fitzgerald Mystery Series

  “High-class suspense.”

  —The New York Times on American Quartet

  “Adler’s a dandy plot-weaver, a real tale-teller.”

  —Los Angeles Times on American Sextet

  “Adler’s depiction of Washington—its geography, social whirl, political intrigue—rings true.”

  —Booklist on Senator Love

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  —Los Angeles Times on Death of a Washington Madame

  “Both the public and the private story in Adler’s second book about intrepid sergeant Fitzgerald make good reading, capturing the political scene and the passionate duplicity of those who would wield power.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Immaculate Deception

  Praise for Warren Adler’s Fiction

  “Warren Adler writes with skill and a sense of scene.”

  —The New York Times Book Review on The War of the Roses

  “Engrossing, gripping, absorbing… written by a superb storyteller. Adler’s pen uses brisk, descriptive strokes that are enviable and masterful.”

  —West Coast Review of Books on Trans-Siberian Express

  “A fast-paced suspense story… only a seasoned newspaperman could have written with such inside skills.”

  —The Washington Star on The Henderson Equation

  “High-tension political intrigue with excellent dramatization of the worlds of good and evil.”

  —Calgary Herald on The Casanova Embrace

  “A man who willingly rips the veil from political intrigue.”

  —Bethesda Tribune on Undertow

  Warren Adler’s political thrillers are…

  “Ingenious.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Diverting, well-written and sexy.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Exciting.”

  —London Daily Telegraph

  New York Echoes 2

  Warren Adler

  Copyright © 2011, 2016 by Warren Adler

  ISBN (EPUB edition): 9780795348815

  ISBN (Kindle edition): 9780795348822

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination based on historical events or are used fictitiously.

  Inquiries: [email protected]

  STONEHOUSE PRESS

  Produced by Stonehouse Productions

  Cover design by Alexia Garaventa

  Published 2016 by RosettaBooks

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Trust Me

  Secret Lovers

  Bad Patch

  A String Of Pearls

  How Can I Possibly Make You Understand?

  First Rites

  Their Greatest Achievement

  Looking For Al

  A Small Price To Pay

  A Little White Lie

  Remembrance Of Things Past

  In God’s Name

  The Love Of His Life

  Just Wild About Harry

  Risk And Reward

  The Theatergoers

  Big Judy

  Peeling The Onion

  They Always Held Hands

  The Polka Dot Dress

  The Other People

  More Short Stories from Warren Adler

  Also by Warren Adler

  About the Author

  Introduction

  My mother used to say that there are two places in the world: New York City and out-of-town.

  In my callow youth, I did not take her seriously and hungered to see and experience out-of-town. I did. I lived in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and traveled extensively. I’ve concluded after many decades of observation that out-of-town is fine and offers many singular interests, intimate pleasures and varied personalities, environments and landscapes.

  Many places out-of-town have served me well, providing backgrounds for many of my books and stories. Indeed, I am grateful for the nourishment that out-of-town provided my imagination.

  Still, at the risk of being dubbed a jingoistic ingrate and mindless booster, I have finally concluded that mother was right. What she meant, of course, was that New York City was unique, a world apart, a place like no other spot on the planet, a diverse, complicated mosaic of the human condition in all its splendor and richness. It is a city of both reality and imagination where hopes and dreams permeate every atom of its human and material structure.

  In this dreamscape, millions of humans brush against one another like ants in their busy underground corridors, each bent on pursuing tasks that give meaning to their lives. The city functions by the grace of a thousand little miracles. One can feel the pulse of life here, the heartbeat of creative energy. It is a glorious paradise where everyone worships at a million shrines, privately and secretly bowing to the Gods of fame and fortune.

  Aspiration and self-fulfillment rule in this arena of hot energy. It is a fabulous potpourri for all ages and inclinations. In this city, one can be oneself, and all differences are respected and celebrated. Every day is a feast for the senses. One sees and feels it on the city streets, on the subways and buses, in the theaters and concert halls, in the restaurants, in the tunnels and on the bridges, in the houses of worship, in the stores and the parks, in the faces of its citizens who pretend not to look but observe everyone else with laser intensity. It is ever changing, always in flux, never resting, a city that never sleeps, always conscious, always alive.

  There is an underside as well, a pervasive and always-present sense of human struggle, sometimes tragic, often confusing, even heartbreaking. That part cannot be ignored if the author is on the trail of truth.

  What a fantastic environment for a writer of the imagination, a storyteller seeking truth, intensity, excitement and suspense. It is a gift to live here.

  That is why, after roaming the world for decades, stories set in New York are pouring out of me like an endless river. My first New York Echoes collection was published in 2008. Famed actress Cynthia Nixon read six of the stories, now available on Audible. Her passion and understanding of these stories is a rare treat.

  This is the second collection. My hope is that there will be others. I’ve included two stories, “The Other People” and “The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress,” published in anthologies more than sixty years ago before I began my serious wanderings out-of-town. Even then, I was in love with it, although I had not realized it in my youthful ignorance.

  I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

  Warren Adler

  Spring 2011

  Trust Me

  I was visiting my father in a nursing home in West Palm Beach, Florida. Visiting might not be the correct description. Viewing him would be more accurate. He had Alzheimer’s and didn’t have the foggiest notion who I was. All he did was sit in his wheelchair, staring out in front of him, his eyes glazed and indifferent. Occasionally he made strange sounds. It tore me up to see him like this.

  I was there more out of guilt or duty or obligation. I doubt if it had anything to do with love. The man I loved, who was my father, had slowly disintegrated. He had simply disappeared. What I saw before me was merely a vague shadow of a man
, barely recognizable as such. It has been said that a man’s soul leaves him on death, what they call “giving up the ghost.” My father’s ghost had left him years ago.

  Most of the nursing home workers on the floor were surly and couldn’t care less. I guess they thought it was pointless to show any real caring since the patients didn’t give a damn. It really hurt to observe that, although I understood why it was so. After all, who would take such jobs? It was depressing and thankless and low-paying.

  That’s why, I suppose, my attention was directed to a small lady with blue-gray hair, who walked among the living dead slumped in their wheelchairs. She stopped to talk to each of them, bending low to catch their eyes, smiling and offering pleasant inquiries as to their health and outlook as if they were normal human beings. Of course, they didn’t answer, but that did not daunt this lady, and when she left them she would squeeze an arm or a shoulder and offer a farewell that surely fell on deaf ears.

  “Remember, you take care now,” I heard her say.

  She came to my father and performed her routine. I thought I saw a brief spark of recognition, but I wasn’t sure. She bent over him and gave him a bear hug. Miraculously, he smiled and hugged her back. He had never done that for me.

  “He’s a cute guy,” she said with a perky laugh, blue eyes twinkling behind silver-rimmed glasses. She had the clear, contented look of a person who took joy in helping other people.

  “My dad,” I said when she turned her glance at me.

  “I mean it. He is cute,” she said.

  He didn’t seem cute to me.

  “You come here often?” I asked.

  “Make my rounds every day. Just a volunteer, though,” she said. “Visiting my kids.” She turned to my father. “Right, Paul?” Once again I saw a vague response of recognition in his eyes.

  Somehow her presence took the edge off my gloom. I had dreaded this visit, just as I had dreaded all those that came before. I could not remember ever meeting this woman at the home, and yet she had the look of someone I had known.

  It puzzled me and since she was so open and friendly, I knew it would not be an intrusion to make some inquiries.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I live a mile from here.”

  “I mean where you grew up.”

  I studied her face, inspected the blue eyes, the lips that smiled broadly, wrinkling her face. I figured her for late sixties.

  “Pennsylvania,” she said. “My father was a coal miner.”

  “Never been there. But I do think we’ve met before.”

  I told her that I was from Manhattan, a lawyer. I was married with two kids, both grown and on their own. For some reason, I felt compelled to volunteer these details. Often these days I was meeting people that were vaguely familiar, faces out of my past, except that they had not aged. It was, of course, an illusion. Only the image, the snapshot of memory in true time, stays the same. People change.

  “I liked Manhattan in the old days,” she said, smiling, showing an even set of obviously false teeth.

  “You lived there?”

  “No.” She laughed. “I once worked in Brooklyn for a few months. I hear it’s still there.” It was then that she winked at some imaginary person over my shoulder.

  Of course. I knew instantly. This was Jean Moran. Jean Moran forty-odd years later. A chill rolled up and down my spine. Jean Moran. I wanted to rise up and hold her in my arms. But I didn’t, for reasons that you will soon know.

  “I lived there when I was a kid,” I answered, suddenly stunned by my recall.

  She looked at me suddenly as if I had caught her attention. I felt her brief intense inspection and then she smiled again and said goodbye with a cheery wave. I watched her walk spryly down the polished corridors until she turned a corner and was out of sight.

  Memories, I thought, looking at my father to whom memory had already died. Memory is history and history is the record of your life, our lives. I felt an overwhelming pity for my father. I know, Dad, I said in my heart. Without memory there is nothing.

  Perhaps it was because all memory had vanished in the minds all around me that my memory suddenly became so acute. This was the Alzheimer’s floor. But Jean Moran, the young Jean Moran, emerged in my mind full-blown in present time, the Jean Moran who had touched my life so deeply and profoundly when I was eleven years old.

  As I sat there watching my mindless father, time slipped away and I was back in my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an ornate building in the Crown Heights section.

  In the style of the times, the building had a large lobby presided over by a doorman. The lobby was dominated by a huge fireplace with an electric simulated fire and suits of armor on each side of it and, in front of it, a suite of dungeon-like furniture. This passed for elegance in those days. It even had a name, which escapes me, except that it ended in “Arms,” which, I assume the owners used to summon up images of old English castles.

  It had the aura of “fanciness,” although the people who lived there were no more than three decades out of the ghetto and most of them had been hauled across the big pond by their parents escaping the pogroms of Russia. So they were making it in the new world, even though there was a depression on.

  Appearances then, like now, had the same shallow façade. My father was a bookkeeper for a clothing firm, but my mother had a keen strategy for making it seem as if he were the owner of the firm. My mother also kept a servant. She called her “the girl,” not the maid. A maid was always colored. A girl was a step up in the pecking order of perceived prestige.

  I always felt that hiring a “girl” was also the price my father had to pay for Jerry’s arrival seven years after me. From my mother’s point of view, Jerry put a housekeeping burden on my mother that required the assistance of a full-time sleep-in servant, a “girl.”

  The girls didn’t stay long and with good reason. Neither my mother or father was ever harsh to them, but conditions were rather cramped and, after all, the girls got restless. Periodically, after one of them quit, my father would come home with another, apparently from some agency in Manhattan.

  They were always fresh, pink-skinned, shy Irish girls from large families of unemployed miners from the coalfields of Pennsylvania or Ohio. For the most part, they were always pleasant, hardworking, and polite. They had to be. They needed the work.

  I am talking, of course, of the deepest darkest days of the depression. Families were starving. To survive, families sent their daughters to New York to find work, any work. Most of these girls had never left home. I think most of them were in their twenties and I’m sure they worked cheap, since we did not have very much money. My father was glad to have a job in those days.

  The main problem with working for our family was space. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I slept with my brother Jerry on a double bed in the bedroom. A foot away was another bed in which the girl slept. My parents slept on a daybed in the living room. There was one bathroom.

  It didn’t seem at all cramped to me. I had no other frame of reference. I can place my state of mind at that time in an odd way. I was a bit of a sissy. I still played with dolls, albeit boy dolls as well as girl dolls. When everyone was out of the house, I would stand in front of the mirror with a doll in hand and imagine myself and my doll in various situations. It can best be described as going into a trance, transporting myself through time to another place, imagining myself and my doll, no longer a doll, of course, but a real person, in some exciting situation. It was a lot like seeing a movie in my mind with me and my doll in starring roles. My father hated my playing with dolls.

  “He’s too old for it,” he would say. There was no way to hide his comments in a one-bedroom apartment. Usually my parents would have their confabulations in bed, within easy earshot of us boys and the girl.

  “Stanley is still a child,�
�� my mother would counter.

  “He’ll be twelve.”

  This worry seemed to occupy my father’s mind a great deal at the time. Once they raised their voices over the matter, and, of course, I heard every word.

  “It’s unhealthy, Martha. I think we should throw away Stanley’s dolls.”

  “You’ll break his heart.”

  “He’ll grow up to be a damned pansy.”

  I had no idea what he meant. There was a long silence after that then my mother said:

  “One thing I won’t do is throw them away. How could we explain it?”

  “Tell him dolls are for girls.”

  “That will only exaggerate the problem.”

  “I’m not so sure. He’s a big sissy, you know. He’s not much for sports and such.”

  “He’ll outgrow it.”

  “I hope so.”

  All this was very confusing to me, although I thought I knew what a sissy was. I thought it meant coward and I knew I was no more a coward than any of the other boys. I didn’t like team sports and probably deprived my father of the joys of rooting for his boy on the playing field. He loved baseball, which was the big neighborhood sport at the time. I could take it or leave it. I was good at track, though, being a pretty fast runner. But who came out to watch track in those days? Besides, it was all over so damned fast.

  Of course appearances had a lot to do with my being perceived as a sissy. I was pretty with blond curly hair and big brown eyes. I also had the kind of skin that blushed easily and, at times, I looked as if someone had rouged my cheeks.

  Also, my mother made sure I was always neat and well dressed with a perfectly clean white shirt and pressed longies with razor-sharp creases. Looking back, I suppose I might agree with my father. I looked like a sissy. I played with dolls. I didn’t like contact sports. By those measures, I was, indeed, a sissy.

  Jean Moran, as she was then, is vivid in my mind. She came after Josephine who followed Maggie. I remember those blue eyes, her warm smile and sparkling white teeth. She had a milky way of freckles across her nose and joked with me a lot. But it was the wink, that same wink, that she had given me forty-odd years later in the nursing home that branded her, unmistakably, as the Jean Moran I knew.