And Sometimes I Wonder About You (12 page)

I
told Clarence he could sleep in my daughter’s bed. She wouldn’t mind. Shelly was away at college living with a man thrice her age.

It was early morning when I awoke in the emperor-sized bed that I’d shared with a woman who hadn’t needed love when anyone wanted it with her. But that didn’t mean we didn’t make a durable team. Katrina and I worked together like a machine constructed from indestructible parts and supplied with an infinite power source. We’d never stop functioning but we were terribly out of alignment. We clattered and struggled, twirled and fell down—but we never stopped working and we couldn’t turn off.

I missed Katrina, loved Aura, and wanted Marella so badly that I could taste her in my sleep.

So there I was at 5:47 with the father that had abandoned me down the hall, the women I needed jostling around in my mind, and a cognac hangover from my head to my gut and through every nerve of my body. It wasn’t until I made it to the bathroom, standing next to the tub where I had found Katrina in bloody suicide-water, that I remembered Hiram Stent.

As bad as I felt, he had got it worse.

When ice-cold water from the shower hit my skin I wanted to scream; three minutes later the shiver had made it to the bone; from that point I counted to a hundred and then came out of the glass box shower stripped of fear, lust, love, self-pity, and most importantly my hangover.

Leaving a key, automatic lock-release, and note for my father, I began the long walk down to Fifty-seventh Street and the first stop of my investigation.

There was a fancy diner across the street from the art school where Fontu Belair taught life drawing at a late morning class from 10:00 to 12:00. My watch read 7:14 and so I ordered an omelet with jalapeños, goat cheese, and merguez sausage. The fancy young waitress wore a pink miniskirt and a white silk T-shirt so short that it revealed her sapphire navel ring. Her nametag read
MIDGE
and her lips were painted apricot. When Midge went to deliver my order to the kitchen I took out my phone and made a call.

“Good morning, Mr. McGill,” Zephyra Ximenez said, answering before I could hear the first ring.

“Back at ya,” I said.

That was it for the pleasantries. From there Z went into her spiel.

“It was really hard finding a Briscoe/Thyme anywhere. I finally located papers filed for them in the Denver offices of a large accounting firm named Feggers and Sons, Ltd. F and S, the name they do business under, was originally a London-based firm that was old enough to have done accounting for Charles Dickens. I followed the trail of ownership back to a Boston company named Braverman Enterprises. Braverman is a holding company that’s owned by a private investment bank controlled by a woman named Evangeline Sidney-Gray. The only law Briscoe/Thyme practices comes from her desk in downtown Boston.

“Finding Ms. Gray was difficult but Josh Farth took no time at all. He came up through the Boston gangs making a living on heists, robberies, and extortion. He’s been mentioned as a person of interest in three murders but no charges have been made. Now Farth works for Evangeline Sidney-Gray, or at least a company her bank owns.

“I only found a little on Coco Lombardi, mainly phone records when she had some kind of relationship with a guy named Alfred Carr. His nickname is Buster. The majority of her calls were either to Carr in New York or various numbers in the Boston area.

“Finally there’s the moniker ‘Twitcher.’ That was by far my biggest headache. I had to piggyback on an NSA program that Bug infected. His subroutine has been crafted so that the feds can’t see it and Bug has it running twenty-four hours a day. I had to drop a key word into the transitional chatter-box and watch it until and if anything came up. Once a key word hit had been made by the box I had ninety seconds to remove it or some bureaucrat in DC would be alerted to the name and the hack.”

“I don’t need the technical explanation right now, Z,” I said. The pink and blue-jeweled waitress was delivering my upmarket eggs. “Just the details will do.”

“The name popped up seventeen times,” she said. “Four of these were about a meeting on the Upper West Side near the river and One-oh-two.”

“I know the place,” I said. “Thanks for all that.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Will you be needing any more help within the next few days? Because if not I called Petipor and we’re going on what he calls a surfing expedition in South Africa for a week or so starting tomorrow night. He’s got his own private jet.”

“Wow,” I said. “That beats my dark green Pontiac.”

“I’d rather be in the backseat with you than at Mach two with him.”

Zephyra had never spoken a flirtatious word to me before. I wondered what was happening inside me.

“If you need help you have Bean’s number, right?” Bean was her backup in times of emergency.

“I do. Just a few more things I need,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Make me a first-class Acela reservation for Boston tomorrow morning as much before ten as possible and e-mail all the information you have on Dame Evangeline Sidney-Gray and Coco. And don’t take any shit from some royal dude.”

“See ya, Mr. McGill. And thanks.”

The omelet was delicious. And Midge was an art student at the school across the street. Tiny as she was, she was a sculptor who liked to work in the double medium of iron and stone. I asked if she knew a teacher there named Fontu Belair.

“Oh him,” she said.

“Not such a good guy?” I asked, trying not to read too far into her tone.

“He taught me how to draw for sculpture,” she said. “Probably the best class I ever had. He said that drawing for a sculptor, filmmaker, or physicist was like dreams for somebody on a
psychoanalyst’s
couch. He was completely right.”

“That sounds pretty good,” I offered.

“I guess.”

“So what was wrong with him?”

“It’s the way he looked at women,” she said, a little color rising in her cheeks. “It’s like love. When he talks to you it’s almost like you’re dancing with him or something. But then there’s nothing to add. When he finishes he turns off completely and if you ask him to get together for coffee he’s too busy…talking to somebody else.”

E
ntering the great copper double doors of the Gotham Artists’ Society at 8:28, I went to the reception desk, which was in the northmost corner of a chamber with a high ceiling held up by a dozen marble pillars.

“May I help you?” a middle-aged black male receptionist asked. His nameplate read
TITO PALMER
. Despite his age he was the same size as Midge, and he held himself with a sense of youth that was unconscious in the
waitress/sculptor
and engineered by Tito.

“My name is McGill,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet a Mr. Belair.”

“And what is your business with Professor Belair?” Tito asked with equal parts suspicion and flirtation.

“I’m supposed to model for his new class using sportsmen that have been out of practice for a while.”

“What sport did you do?”

“Boxer.”

Tito’s raised eyebrows expressed mild interest. There was something going on with me; all of a sudden I had become a magnet for the usually hidden passions of humankind.

“Third floor, studio F,” Tito said as if the words were a loan that he expected a return on.

Studio F was occupied by four souls. Three of these were students who had come in early to work on very technical and equally uninteresting studies of a woman with sagging breasts with well-defined nipples and a small protruding tummy.

The fourth resident of the light and airy space was a burly man just a centimeter or two north of six feet. He was dressed in a brightly stained white artist’s smock, bald on top, and filled with the passion of his self-imposed importance. If I wasn’t a boxer I’d have been a little intimidated by his strength and the energy that crackled around him.

“Can I help you?” he asked, more as a threat than as a request.

“Leonid McGill,” I said, handing him a card that said the same. “I’m a PI looking for a woman named Coco Lombardi.”

“Do you see her?” he asked, gesturing at his students, two of which were women.

“I see you,” I replied easily.

Something changed in the art professor’s eyes just then. He looked at my big scarred mitts and at the powerful slope of my shoulders. I wasn’t a minion and he wasn’t a lord—not right then, not right there.

“What do I have to do with this, this…whatever her name is?”

“She was a model for your class.”

“I have dozens of models. Do you expect me to remember them all?”

“I expect, from all my fellow citizens, the same things,” I said. “Civility, respect, and honesty. It’s rare to receive any of those commodities but I keep hope alive.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. McGill?”

“If I was, your jaw would already be broken,” I said.

One of the drawing students was glancing in our direction. She was middle-aged and looked it.

“Let’s go to my office,” Fantu offered when he saw his student studying us.

Behind a screen of very large canvases there was an institutional-green metal door that opened onto a good-sized office space. Inside, the twenty-foot-high walls supported dozens of drawings and paintings in cheap frames hung very close together. They were all rendered by the same hand. If I were to bet I’d’ve said that Professor Belair saw this office as a museum dedicated to his work.

The furniture was a green metal desk and chair, a pine visitor’s chair, and a daybed with a sponge-sized pillow and a gray army blanket.

The bed was made, military style, and the blue linoleum floor was spotless.

“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

We achieved our seats and Fantu sat back giving me a stare that probably worked on people who hadn’t strangled a man to death when they were fourteen and living in the street.

“That’s not your real name, is it?” I said.

“Why are you looking for Coco?”

“You admit that you know her.”

“I just want to know why you’re looking for her.”

“Her family fears that she has fallen in with bad company and that her well-being is threatened.”

“You don’t talk like a detective,” he said suspiciously.

I took out my duly licensed .38 caliber pistol and laid it on the green blotter that clashed with rather than matched his desk.

“How many detectives do you know, Professor?”

Some people you just have to take shortcuts with. We could have talked for an hour about how the police and private detectives on his TV and in his library don’t talk like I do. But put a pistol on the table and that whole block of thought just disappears.

“She was modeling for my classes six, seven months ago,” he said, exhibiting his proclivity for not answering the question he’d just been asked. “I liked her very much, as a model, because even though she worked in the nude there always seemed to be something hidden.”

“You ever find out what that something was?”

“No.”

“Did you fuck her?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought you wanted me to talk like Mickey Spillane so I threw in a curse word. I’m not sure if he cursed in his books but you got the feeling he might any second.”

“She stopped modeling for my classes at the beginning of last summer,” Fantu said. “I haven’t heard from her since then.”

“Did you fuck her?” I enjoyed disturbing the bully with my words.

“We were”—he stopped and looked up the way people do when they’re reaching for a difficult
word—“friends.”

“What was she like?” I asked.

The question surprised him.

“She,” he said and then hesitated again. “She was very intelligent. She knew more about the history of art than most of my
colleagues—myself
included. She had a friend, a man who was not the same kind as her.”

“What does that mean, not the same kind?”

“He was shifty, unpleasant. For a week or so he’d come around after a session and take her away. Finally she left and never came back.”

“What was this man’s name?”

“She never said and he didn’t speak to anyone but her.”

“Did they meet here at the institute?”

“No. But I don’t think she knew him when she first came here. Soon after they met, our friendship faded and then she was gone…Why are you looking for her, Mr. McGill?”

“I already told you. Her family thinks she’s in trouble. It’s my job to find her and see if they’re right.”

“You’re supposed to drag her home?”

“I would if that’s what they asked for but all they said is that they’d like me to ask her to call them. Did she have any other friends here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Have you seen her at all since she stopped modeling?”

“Well…”

“Where?”

“There’s a gentlemen’s club somewhere around the theater district, I don’t remember the name. I was there one, one afternoon and Coco was, um, serving drinks. I tried to talk to her but she ignored me and then she was gone.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, thank you, Professor Belair, you’ve been a lot of help.”

“Mulligan,” he said.

“What?”

“Frank Mulligan. I went to university at Santa Cruz in California. Some of the other art students and I did acid every day for two weeks. Soon after that I changed my name to Fantu Belair. I really don’t know why but I think it has helped me.”

“E
xcuse me, mister,” a woman called out from somewhere behind me.

I was almost to the broad marble stairway that led down to the first floor. Turning, I saw the late-middle-aged woman who had been watching me and Mr. Mulligan. She wore a knee-length khaki skirt and a loose red blouse that partially hid her large breasts. She’d let her hair go gray but her face still had the creamy complexion of youth.

“Yes?” I said.

“You’re looking for Coco?”

“Yes?” I said, wondering if Mulligan had confided in her. It didn’t seem likely.

“Professor Belair is a wonderful teacher,” she said. “It’s almost like he can inhabit your soul and bring art out of you that would never happen otherwise. He sees inside, you know what I mean?”

She was wearing simple white-plug earphones connected to some music device in a khaki pocket.

“What about Coco?” I said, feeling like a shepherd of conversation.

“They had an affair,” the elder art student said. “She spent afternoons and evenings on that cot in his office. After the first few modeling sessions he let her stay there the first three months she worked here. I think he paid her extra, too.”

“There’s a name for that,” I said.

“She was in trouble.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Did she talk about it?”

“It was the way she was always so jumpy. She’d actually flinch if anyone, I mean anyone, walked into the room. And when she’d walk with Fantu it looked kind of like she was using him as a shield, you know what I mean?”

I nodded and asked, “Was she a friend of yours?”

“No. We never spoke other than to say hello now and then.”

“So Fantu told you I was looking for her?”

“He doesn’t talk to gray-haired ladies unless it’s about their work. Don’t get me wrong, he does his job. He’s a good teacher and can’t help it that he’s a man.” These last few words had the ring of a deeply held conviction about the entire gender.

“Then how did you know I was asking about Coco?”

Smiling, the lady brought out a small white plastic box that was connected to her earphones. It didn’t look like any digital music player I’d ever seen.

The lady smiled, revealing two missing teeth; one upper and one lower.

“It’s what they called on the late-night TV informercial an
omnidirectional
listening device,” she said. “All I have to do is switch this knob on top and I can hear anything anybody says, in any direction within fifteen feet or so. I’m always eavesdropping; on the street, in classes, at church. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that people say and do. I heard this one guy say that he raped a woman. I called the police from a pay phone and told them, but they didn’t do anything. That’s why I decided to tell you what I know.”

“Why’s that exactly?”

“Because I think that girl’s in trouble and you’re already looking for her. I thought maybe if I told you I might be some help.”

“What kind of trouble was Coco in?” I asked.

“Somebody was after her. I heard her tell Fantu that there was somebody she needed to help her get out of trouble. I never learned why they were after her or what the trouble was.”

“If you think she’s in trouble, why wouldn’t you suppose that that trouble was me?”

“Is it?” she asked, innocent as a child.

“No.” I smiled, hoping there was somebody to keep
her
out of trouble. “I’m a PI working for her family like I said.”

I handed her my card and she glanced at it.

“I didn’t think so,” she said.

“Did you hear the name of the guy she needed to help her?”

“It could have been a woman,” the old-school feminist objected.

“But it wasn’t, was it?”

“No. I guess you’re a detective and can see things that maybe I don’t understand,” she allowed.

“You can really listen in on people’s conversations with that thing?” I asked.

“They think I’m an old lady listening to rock and roll or something.”

“Damn.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” she said.

“The guy she was waiting for?”

The gray head bobbed and gave me her best serrated grin. “You could tell when Fantu was flirting with her that she was just mouthing her answers. She just needed a place to sleep and a few bucks in her pocket. Soon as she found something better she was gone.”

“How did you hear the name of the guy she was looking for?” I asked more from habit than anything else.

“He came into the class one day,” she said, triumphant. “He was short. Not so much as you, and skinny. He wore a silly suit and bow tie and his hair was too long for a man of his age. Fantu asked him what he was doing here and he said his name was Paulie DeGeorges and he was there to talk to Coco. He said something about her brother but somebody sneezed and I couldn’t make that part out.”

“Paulie DeGeorges,” I said aloud.

“That’s right.”

“And what’s your name?” I asked.

For a moment there was suspicion and fear in the matron’s round brown eyes. But then she came to some kind of internal resolve. “Irene Carnation. Carnation like the flower.”

“You have my card, Irene. If Coco comes back you should call me. And maybe if you get tired of classes and street corners one day, you might want to call a real detective. I might could give you some work from time to time.”

“This little jigger only cost forty-nine ninety-five,” she said. “You could buy one yourself.”

“It’s you that’s the jewel, Irene. Somebody sees me and they know to worry. You…that’s money in the bank right there.”

A look of wonder came over Irene Carnation’s face. A door was open and she was wondering if she had the courage to walk through.

Early afternoon found me uptown at a high park along the Hudson River looking down on a concrete wall. The barrier was a blank slate except for a door-sized hole thirty feet below, almost at the waterline. There’s a very official-looking iron ladder that leads down to the hole but neither that opening nor the ladder is supposed to be there.

I made my way down to the water, maybe two hundred yards from the wall. From there I could keep a watch on the portal and use the fishing pole I’d picked up from home to give anybody looking a reason for why I was there.

Clarence had left by the time I got home. He’d taken the keys and so I expected to see him in less than a year.

I threw my line pretty far out. My secret for fishing was learned from an old guy named Cranston. He taught me that you needed a heavy weight, at least eight ounces, on your line and that the best bait was a giant gutter cockroach. I had both bug and pyramid-shaped lead weight and so I sat down on a craggy concrete plank that had been dumped there to maintain the shoreline. After I had my hook in the water and the pole between my knees I took out the Canadian socialist paper
The People’s Voice
. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was once associated with a paper by the same name, and I think it was out of a soft spot I had for him that I kept up the subscription.

From time to time a young boy or girl climbed down the ladder to the hole and then scrambled inside; a few minutes later they’d clamber back up again. They looked like ants filled with a purpose laid down in their DNA millions of years ago. Watching them come and go, I remembered the man named Tusk who came from Australia and fabricated an underground pied-à-terre deep within the man-made wall.

Tusk was more of an artist than a survivalist. There was running water and electricity in the cave. I’d shown the place to Twill when he was no more than fourteen.

I sat there for hours reading about dreams that my father had taught me and then abandoned. I caught two good-sized flounder and an American eel that was more than a yard long. I cleaned the flounders and put them in a pink plastic bucket I’d brought along. I let the eel go.

At twilight Twill, replete in blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, came scrambling out of the hole. I picked up my bucket and pole and climbed to the street. From there I followed my wayward son until he was headed east from Broadway on Seventy-second.

“Twitcher! Hold up,” I called from maybe ten feet back.

Twilliam McGill, as usual, was unflappable. He turned and smiled as if to say, “What took you so long, old man?”