Anonymous Rex (8 page)

Back at the office, I do a fair job bitching at Dan over the phone for not telling me Burke was in such a sorry state and, as a result, generally wasting my afternoon, but my heart’s not in it. Despite my dumb little hunches, the Evolution Club fire, tragic though it may be, has all the signs of a true accident, and I’m ready to issue my report, take my thousand bucks from Teitelbaum, and get some much-needed sleep.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Dan says, “I got some background info on the guy. Just picked it up from records. I could fax it over to you.”

“Anything interesting?” I ask.

“Birth date, work history, that sorta thing. Nah, nothing interesting.”

“Send it over anyway,” I say. “Makes the client happy.” For the two minutes it takes me to scan the fax, Teitelbaum can charge ten extra minutes to the insurance company; daily rates work on a prorated basis, and the fees are jacked to the sky.

The documents arrive a few moments later, spilling out of the fax machine on six of the eighteen sheets of paper I have left to my name. Most of the furniture has been repossessed, as have the desks, cabinets, and venetian blinds, but I’ve still got one phone line and
one fax machine, remnants of the days when I paid for things in cold, hard cash.

It’s the usual claptrap, useless information from which I can glean little or nothing I didn’t already know. Donovan Burke, born back east, blah blah blah, parents deceased, blah blah blah, never married, no children, etc., etc., nightclub manager, yadda yadda, last job before Evolution Club was in New York working for—

Oh, my. Now this is interesting.

Last job before Evolution Club was in New York working for the late Raymond McBride. Seems Mr. Burke ran a club for McBride on the Upper West Side called Pangea, then hopped town two years ago, citing “creative differences” with the playboy owner. Within weeks he had found the backing to set himself up in Studio City, certainly not wasting any time in trying his hand at fame and fortune LA style.

Interesting, yes. Useful? Not really.

What is quite the crotch-grabber is this little tidbit, printed unassumingly at the bottom of the page: McBride’s wife was the one who was really involved in the day-to-day affairs of the dino mogul’s nightclub investments. McBride’s wife was the one who worked so closely with Donovan Burke at Pangea. McBride’s wife was the one with whom Burke had had his “creative differences,” and McBride’s wife was the one who sent him packing over three thousand miles away.

Her name, of course, is Judith.

I give Dan a ring and tell him I got the fax.

“Any help?” he asks.

“Nope,” I reply. “None at all. Thanks anyway.”

My next call is to TruTel’s travel agent, and within three hours I’m winging it across the country on a $499 round-trip red-eye, destination Wall Street. Start spreading the news.

T
he flight is wholly uneventful, but when we land, the human passengers choose to applaud nevertheless, as if they were expecting a different conclusion to the evening’s festivities. I have never understood this; the only cause I have ever had to applaud while aboard an airplane was when the flight attendant mistakenly gave me two packs of roasted peanuts instead of my rationed single pack. In retrospect, I should have remained quiet, as my clapping alerted the stewardess to her error, and she took away my extra helping.

Teitelbaum would have me killed and mounted on his wall if he knew my true intentions in coming to the city. I let him know that some leads were pointing back toward New York, requested a company credit card (with a five-thousand-dollar limit, no joke!), and he proceeded to grill me over the phone.

“You gonna stick to this case?”

“Of course,” I reassured him. “That’s why I’m going out there. For the insurance company.”

“No screwing around with that dead partner of yours?”

“Right,” I said. “None of that.”

But if the case leads to McBride, then naturally, I may have to ask questions regarding McBride’s death, and if I have to ask questions
about McBride’s death, I may stumble across information about one of the initial private investigators on the case, my “dead partner” Ernie. Of course, I don’t have to let Teitelbaum know any of it. All he has to know is that the insurance company is forking over even more money for an inflated expense account that now includes a stay in the second most extravagant city in America. Next time I’ll just have to hope someone gets killed in Vegas.

I have chosen not to rent a car in the city, a decision that, according to my cabbie, was a wise move. There is a special art to driving through New York, he tells me through an indistinguishable accent, and I gather that the uninitiated should not attempt an excursion on their own. Although the cab driver is a human, he nevertheless has his own special scent, though it is not the fresh stroke of pine on a crisp autumn morning, to say the least.

“Where you want go?” he asks me, and suddenly I feel like I’m dealing with Suarez again. Can no one other than myself speak the language? But he’s just a human—a foreigner, probably—and he speaks my native tongue better than I speak his (unless he’s from Holland, as my Dutch is practically fluent).

“McBride Building,” I say, and he tears into traffic, instantly accelerating to at least ninety miles an hour before he slams on the brakes half a block later. It’s a good thing I haven’t eaten in a while. We’re in Manhattan before he speaks again.

“You business at McBride?” he asks, glancing at me all too often in the rearview mirror. I’d rather he pay a little more attention to the actual operation of his automobile.

“I have some business at the building,” I say. “This afternoon.”

“He big man, McBride.”

“Big man,” I echo lamely.

As the cab stutters and stops along the street, flashbacks of my last visit to New York stream before my eyes, a blur of police stations and witnesses, missing evidence and rude rebuffs. And more than a few shopping market produce aisles. New York, if I remember correctly, has some particularly potent marjoram, but their supply of fenugreek is sorely lacking.

With any hard-core investigation comes the requisite accoutrements of the office, and due to my recent financial troubles, I’m
light on the proper attire. I consider instructing my cabbie to pull over at the nearest department store, where I could promptly use the TruTel credit card to purchase the needed items, but I doubt such mass-produced items would lend the proper authenticity.

On the corner of Fifty-first and Lexington, I stop the cab at an honest-to-goodness New York millinery and buy a tan and black porkpie hat.

On Thirty-ninth, I buy a trench coat. I get a good deal because it is eighty-three degrees in Manhattan today.

Just below Canal, I buy a package of unfiltered cigarettes, though I do not buy a lighter or matches. These cigs are for dangling, and dangling only.

All decked out now, I renew my request to go to the McBride Building, and we turn in to the financial heart of the city. Minutes later, my destination appears, poking roughly out of the artificial horizon.

The McBride Building, towering symbol of capitalism for the last ten years, stands eighty stories high and a full city block wide, muscling its way through the skyline like an overeager bodybuilder. Reflective glass lines this architectural masterpiece, bright silvery mirrors that suck in the streets of the city and spit them back out again, only in richer, more vibrant colors.

Yeah, okay, it’s pretty enough, in a slick/gaudy sorta fashion, though I can’t extinguish the thought that in many ways it resembles a monstrous silver-plated condom. I hope this renegade image does not haunt me throughout my interview with Mrs. McBride—that is, if I’m able to arrange one.

Inside, the reflective motif continues, mirrors helping me to follow myself wherever I go. I get a few glimpses of my new look; the trench coat works for me, despite the tropical temperatures that have enveloped the city, and the hat hangs heavily on my head, as if constantly threatening to topple. Humans and dinos whiz by, a blur of smells swinging across the odor spectrum. I catch snatches of conversation, snippets about buyouts and mergers and the pennant race. A bold granite reception booth takes up much of the lobby; through the throng of business-creatures, I can discern the outline of a harried secretary.

“Good morning,” I say, hoisting my burgundy garment bag higher onto my shoulder. “I was wondering if Mrs. McBride was available.”

With one short, sassy smile, the McBride Building’s lobby receptionist proves herself to be both more pleasant and infinitely more frightening than my previous secretarial nemesis, Nurse Fitzsimmons. “You want to see Judith McBride?” she says, the sarcasm crouching behind her teeth, scratching at the enamel, just waiting to spring and pounce.

“As soon as possible,” I say.

“And you would have an appointment?”

She knows that I don’t. I have a garment bag slung over my shoulder, for god’s sake. “Yes, yes, certainly.”

“Your name?”

Oh, what the heck. “My name is Donovan Burke.”

Do her eyebrows twitch? Do her ears perk up? Or is that my mind singing those golden oldies of paranoia once again? I want to ask her if she knew Ernie, if she ever saw him around, but I silence my tongue before it can do any damage.

The receptionist lifts the reflective handset of her phone and taps out an extension number. “Shirley?” she says. “Guy down here says he has an appointment with Mrs. McBride. No. No. I don’t know. He has a suitcase.”

“It’s a garment bag. I just flew in from the Coast,” I mutter. “The other coast.” This thing is getting heavier by the millisecond.

“Right, right,” says the receptionist, making sure to keep an eye on me as I struggle with my luggage. “Says his name is Donny Burke.”

“Donovan Burke. Donovan.”

“Oh,” she says. “Sorry.”

“I get it all the time.”

“Donovan Burke,” she clarifies for Shirley, and then we both wait for a moment while Shirley checks the appointment book for a name that all three of us know won’t be in there. The receptionist beams a capped-tooth tiger smile at me; if she has a Wacko Alert button behind that desk, her hand’s getting closer and closer to it.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she tells me a few seconds later, “but we don’t show an appointment for you.” She pointedly hangs the phone on its cradle.

I open my eyes as wide as they will possibly go, affecting my best
look of shock and surprise. Then I nod gravely, as if expecting such a turn of events. “Judi, Judi, Judi … Judith and I, we’ve … we’ve had our rough spots. But if you could have Shirley—is that her name, Shirley?—tell Mrs. McBride that I’m in the building, I can assure you that the good lady will see me. We go back.”

Another fake smile, another laser look of death. Reluctantly, she lifts the phone. “Shirley, it’s me again …”

I am shuttled off to wait in a corner while Shirley and the receptionist chat it out. This time, within minutes—seconds, even!—I am approached by the suddenly respectful secretary and told that Mrs. McBride will see me now, sorry for the inconvenience, I will find her offices on the seventy-eighth floor.

High-speed elevator. Love these things. Good thing I don’t have eustachian tubes.

On the forty-sixth floor, two dinos in the guise of beefy human secret service guards—black suits, ear mikes, and all—enter the elevator, coming around to flank me on either side. They radiate physical power, and I would not be surprised if either had brought along some sand for the express purpose of kicking it in my face. I suppress a strong urge to engage in isometrics.

“Morning, fellas,” I say, tipping my hat. The move tickles me somewhere deep within my archetypal detective conscious, and I resolve to do a lot more hat-tipping.

They do not respond.

“Looking very spiffy in your costumes. Good choices, all around.”

Again, no response. Their pheromones—the dark, heavy scent of fermenting oats, brewing yeasts—have already gained control of the elevator, taking as their hostage my own delightful odor.

“If I had to guess,” I continue, turning to the behemoth to my left, “and let me warn you, I’m good at this—I’d say that you’re an … Allosaur, and this li’l tyke over here is a Camptosaur. Am I right or am I right?”

“Quiet.” The command is soft. I obey it instantly.

A good word to describe Judith McBride’s office—which encompasses the whole of the building’s seventy-eighth floor—is “plush.” Word of the day, no doubt about it. Plush carpets, plush fabrics, a plush view of the Hudson and distant Staten Island out the floor-to-ceiling
windows that comprise the entirety of the structure’s exterior walls. If I go to the bathroom, I am sure to discover that they will have found a way to make tap water plush as well, probably via NutraSweet.

“Nice digs,” I say to my muscle-bound friends. “A lot like my office, actually … in the sense that mine is square, too.”

They are not amused. I am not surprised.

“Mr. Burke?” It is Shirley, the infamous Shirley, calling me toward the main office double doors. “Mrs. McBride is waiting.”

The guards move to flank the office doors as I enter the inner sanctum, drawing the wide brim of my hat down and across my eyes. The goal is to start out low-key and slowly whip the interview into a nice cappuccino froth, maybe work in a few questions about Ernie for a topping. Light levels are dim, the slatted vertical window shades casting dark prison bars across the carpet. Fortunately, the mirror theme has not been duplicated in this room, so to those random thoughts of
condom building, condom building
I can say adios. Instead, all manner of paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art fill the available wall space, and if I knew anything about the illustrative humanities, I would probably be astounded at the breadth of Mrs. McBride’s collection. Might be some Picassos, maybe a few Modiglianis, but as it is, I’m more impressed by the wet bar set off in the far corner.