Free Nightbird by Edward Dee Page B

words.”
    “We were getting like that. Sometimes Gillian would say something, and it was exactly the thing I was thinking. We’d both
     go ‘Wow.’”
    He watched her fight for control again, biting the inside of her lips so hard, it had to bleed.
    “The thing I can’t understand,” Ryan said, “is that she called you on that night and talked to you for twenty-eight minutes…
     hung up… and less than an hour later she took her own life. And you had
no idea
that anything was wrong.”
    “I knew she was upset.”
    “Upset. Of course. She’d just heard she might lose her role in the show. Her producers wanted her tested for drugs. Everything
     she worked for was being destroyed. I’d be nuts if that happened to me.”
    Faye tightened and coiled, as if trying to squeeze out some deep reserve of inner strength. She wasn’t a cold woman; Ryan
     knew ice when he saw it.
    “Don’t you think I would have done something if I thought she was going to hurt herself? Called somebody?”
    “Not necessarily. Maybe you didn’t believe what she was saying. That’s understandable. People say wild things when they’re
     under stress. Crazy things, like they’re going to kill themselves. Most people ignore them at a time like that. I would. If
     we reacted every time people threatened crazy things…”
    He wanted to tell her to just go ahead and cry, for chrissakes. Let it loose. Blow the dam. She wrestled her demons in.
    “She was a little drunk… just blowing off steam.”
    “I’m sure,” Ryan said. “Probably exaggerating, talking stupidly. We all do it when we’re mad.”
    “She said a few things. I didn’t think she’d really do anything. Just blowing off steam.”
    “It wasn’t your fault, Faye.”
    “Some big sister, right? Big help I was.”
    Anthony Ryan leaned over and touched her hand. He had other questions, but he wouldn’t ask them now. He’d made Faye Boudreau
     suffer enough for one day. She wrapped her arms around her chest, as if to physically hold herself together. A low moan slipped
     from her throat, escaped past the guards. She never cried.

10
    V ictor listened to Danny Eumont’s tape on the subway ride home. He didn’t see how questions about Gillian Stone’s drug use
     and her affair with Trey Winters could affect his plan. In fact, the reporter’s probing might encourage Winters to pay greater
     attention to him and settle the matter quickly. The only thing on the tape that worried Victor was the mention of a “source.”
     No “source” was going to screw up his plan.
    Back in the Bronx and too stiff to bend over, he kicked the reporter’s tape recorder into the gutter and sent it clattering
     down a sewer. Then he walked around the corner, dropped the microcassette on the sidewalk, and smashed it under his heel.
     The pulverized tape went into another sewer directly in front of the wood-frame house on Echo Place in which he shared two
     rooms and a bath with Pinto the Russian clown.
    Pinto’s Chevy Nova was gone from its parking spot. Lazy Pinto always drove the car, although it was less than a block walk
     to the Grand Concourse, where you could catch the D train straight to Times Square. Every year Victor suggested they store
     the car for the summer, take the subway. Much cheaper in the long run.
    But what the hell did he care now. Next year Pinto would be on his own, begging tourists for coins by himself. Next year he’d
     be a businessman, a man of wealth and respect. Basking in the warm breezes off the Sea of Cortés and the charms of beautiful
     women. Many beautiful women. As Pinto himself always said, more than anything else, it was money that made women horny.
    Victor climbed the front steps, clutching the rail. The hallway smelled of fresh disinfectant. Their Jamaican-born landlady,
     the widow of a Puerto Rican subway motorman, had carved the house into five odd-shaped apartments, which she ran like a Nazi
     den mother, demanding order and cleanliness.