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“But if there be no accountability, another President will feel free to do as he chooses. The next time there may be no watchman
in the night.”
A fun thing to do after making a demented split-second decision is to dwell on it.
What’s extra fun is, as Stevie was now experiencing, you make that decision and nothing happens. That extra time and space is key if you want to drill down on the deep and myriad ways you’ve probably messed up your life—all
the things you’ve brought on yourself that didn’t have to happen.
The tick tick is worse than the boom every time.
Stevie spent three entire days tick-ticking around the apartment, compulsively checking the phone.
She had long thought of the time between Christmas and New Year’s as a dead space, but this holiday was perhaps too literal.
With Helen gone, the hall went quiet. Benny didn’t make any more offers for trips to the shelter.
Arthur didn’t come to the door. Murph had moved down the hall, so Stevie couldn’t hear him anymore.
Nate dipped in and out of his room, vanishing across to Elliot’s apartment from time to time.
Janelle and Vi would be there soon, but for now, Stevie had only herself and her thoughts, and she didn’t want those.
She did one useful thing, which was watch All the President’s Men, which was pretty good for an old movie, largely because it was a mystery at the core. It was about two reporters on the
trail of the biggest story of their lives—conducting interviews, going through library slips, making calls, having meetings
with someone named Deep Throat who spoke in riddles. It got Stevie interested enough to finally leave the apartment on the
morning of the thirtieth and do the thing she was supposed to be doing—she went to the grand library on Forty-Second Street,
the marble temple of research.
So now Stevie stood in front of a large panel in the New York Public Library showing a picture of a young Black man with a
hint of a smile and a thin mustache, dressed in a shirt and tie and security guard hat, standing by a scratched-up blue metal
door, his hand on the handle. The quote was superimposed over the bottom of the image. Next to it was a panel of text:
June 17, 1972: Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate complex, noticed a piece of duct tape holding back the latch bolt on a door lock, keeping the door from locking.
He removed the tape and continued on his rounds.
A half hour later, when he returned, the tape was back.
Wills immediately called the police and, when they arrived, joined them in a search of the premises and aided in the capture of the five Watergate burglars.
He is considered one of the heroes of the Watergate story.
Without him, the tale might never have been told. He is the watchman in the night.
The curators had arranged the exhibit as a timeline. This was better than a yarn wall—this was a yarn room, where all that
was crooked could be directed along a logical pathway. She skimmed Richard Nixon’s early career to get to the crime part.
1968: Republican Richard Nixon is elected president for the first time.
A bit about what he did in office. More skimming.
1972: Richard Nixon is up for reelection. The Vietnam War raged in the background, bringing mass protests and unrest. His
solution: sabotage his opponents in ways large and small and fund this sabotage with a safe full of cash.
And now she stood before Frank Wills, the watchman in the night. The one who noticed. The one who knew something was wrong and did something about it.
Stevie was familiar with break-ins; she was usually the one doing them. Back at Ellingham, she opened a lot of things—hatches,
floorboards and skirting, holes in the ground, old wounds . . .
But doors in particular. She had learned how to pick locks by watching videos, and she had learned a lot by popping locks
and looking inside rooms. To be the detective was to come from the outside, to look in the drawers and peer in the windows,
to ask the questions no one wanted to answer, piercing privacy and stepping over the boundaries.
Helen’s door seemed to pulse in Stevie’s imagination.
She had seen Helen’s dead body behind that door. Seen a card with a falling tower. Heard about omens.
What would you do if you knew someone was going to commit a murder?
Such a particular question. She thought about it more and more on the slow bus ride back downtown. Thinking about Helen meant
she wasn’t thinking about David not replying, so she allowed herself the chance to wonder. In All the President’s Men, the reporters thought they were looking into a little burglary, and they ended up making the president resign. Sometimes
being persistent and paranoid works out.
In the lobby, she bumped into Lance, who was waiting for the elevator with a large box.
“Inflatable chairs,” he said in answer to the unasked question.
“Right,” Stevie replied as the elevator door opened. Lance, being Stanley Tucci, nodded for Stevie to go first, fake Italian gentleman style.
“It’s an old Italian tradition to throw things out the window on New Year’s Eve,” he said as Stevie hit the button for the
eighth floor. “Usually things you don’t want anymore, like old pans or broken furniture. We can’t throw out furniture here—but
then I saw these inflatable pool chairs online and I had an idea. I ordered them before . . . before. I suppose we’ll still
do something. But not the party we were going to have. Just us and Arthur. And you, if you want to come. We’re having sausage
and lentils.”
“Thanks,” Stevie said.
The elevator had complained its way to the top floor and opened its doors.
“Open offer,” he said. “Or coffee, anytime, if you need to talk. Arthur’s down there with Mitzi now.”
All the President’s Men had contained many scenes of Woodward and Bernstein going to apartments, to houses, over and over, knocking on doors. Asking
questions. That was the first step in any investigation, of course.
“Actually,” she said, “I’d love a coffee, if that’s okay.”
Lance seemed delighted, and Stevie followed him back to his apartment. Mitzi and Arthur were deep in conversation as they
came in.
“I bumped into Stevie in the lobby,” Lance said. “She’s come down for a coffee. What would you like? Espresso? Cappuccino? I got a great new machine for Christmas.”
“You don’t have to . . .”
“Are you kidding?” Mitzi said. “Let him make you a cappuccino.”
Stevie nodded, and Lance happily went about making the coffee.
“Oh, Stevie,” Arthur said, patting the seat next to him. “We’ve been talking about what’s going on with Helen’s place. I found
the number for a lawyer. Looks like she did have one, but no one really knows what’s going on yet.”
“It needs to be taken care of,” Mitzi said. “That bird can’t stay at Benny’s. Maybe someone will come and take the damn thing.
It screams all night. Snacks can’t sleep.”
Snacks snorted as he burrowed his face in his paws.
“I think she said she wanted Benny to have the bird,” Arthur replied.
“Christ. Maybe it’ll eat the roaches. Do birds eat roaches?”
“The snake might,” Stevie said.
“There’s a snake?”
The coffee maker began to hiss as Lance warmed the milk.
“There’s a snake?” Mitzi said again. “What kind of snake?”
“I don’t know,” Stevie said, lowering her head. “It’s pink. It’s a boa something.”
“She’s got a pink boa in there?”
“The day Helen died,” Stevie said, trying to steer the conversation back to the topic, “she asked me to come over in the morning. I got the feeling something was up. Because of what I do, what I’ve done, people tell me things. Things that worry them.”
“Same with me,” Lance said, bringing over Stevie’s coffee. “People always want to tell me their airline horror stories. I
was an air traffic controller. People want to know if I ever saw a crash when I was in the tower.”
The tower again.
“We never had a crash,” he went on, “but I saw some near misses . . . but that was our job. Make sure the near misses were
always misses. I enjoyed it, but this is much more relaxing. And now we can travel as much as we want, for as long as we want.
We can go somewhere and stay there. Settle in.”
“We are somewhere,” Mitzi said. “And we have.”
“. . . like Sorrento, by the sea, with the air smelling of lemons. Capri in the distance. Mount Vesuvius. The ruins of Pompeii . . .”
“That sounds wonderful, Lance. Let’s move next to an active volcano.” Mitzi shook her head. “I worked for TWA, then for Continental,
then Delta, and then Virgin Atlantic. I saw it all. Fights. Emergencies. Behavior like you wouldn’t believe. Back in the day
people were polite on planes. Now they start punching each other . . .”
“She was all by herself in there,” Arthur said, as if continuing a conversation he had been having with himself. “She was
squeezed in there, in that little space between the wall and the bed. If Stevie hadn’t gone around to check . . .”
“Something else I always worried about was all that cash she kept,” Mitzi said.
“She was such an old hippie. Always kept and paid in cash. She didn’t like people knowing her business.
Taxes. Records of what she’d been up to.
She wouldn’t even get a cell phone. Always baking for the doorman to get gossip about who was coming in and out of the building. The cash was from baking jobs.
I said, just put it in the bank, Helen.”
“And I told her that too,” Arthur said. “That it wasn’t safe. Everyone knows about that money. What if people talk? What if
Benny told everyone at the shelter that there’s a woman on her hall with an apartment full of money?”
“Does she have family?” Stevie said.
“She never talked about her family,” Arthur replied. “You know . . . once we were walking past a French-Korean place in the
West Village called the Saucy Goose and she said her boyfriend, Robert, was head chef there now and that his food was excellent—that
I should go, but she couldn’t. And I said, boyfriend? And she said, it was a long time ago, I was engaged to him. Which almost
knocked me over. She wouldn’t say any more. That was the only person she ever mentioned. It’s funny. She was such a . . .
personality. But she seemed to come from nowhere, and now we don’t know what to do about it.”
That, Stevie thought to herself, was something she could help with. And now she had somewhere to start.