Antenna Syndrome (11 page)

“You’re not hard to please.”

“That’s what I told Eddie. But the little prick got
on my nerves anyway. He played guitar when I was trying to work. If
I had a date over, he’d roll around on his wheelchair wearing just
a bathrobe, letting his junk hang out.”

“Crabner was handicapped?”

“Paraplegic. He was run over by a truck the day of
the Brooklyn Blast. You know what it was like, people frantic to
get in or out of Brooklyn, no one stopping for traffic lights. He
almost died on the operating table. His legs were totally crushed.
He waited three months for prosthetics, but they were cheap, didn’t
fit well and the joints kept breaking. But he got on disability
welfare and qualified for experimental surgery.”

“The Avatar Clinic ring a bell?”

“Yeah, that’s where he was going to get the work
done.”

“Ever see the end result of his surgery?”

“No. He was with me for two years, on their waiting
list for the second half. But I don’t know what happened. I assume
they accepted him, because he just disappeared.”

“You never tried to locate him through them?”

“After I fell behind in the rent, I called the
clinic to see if they knew where he was. But they said he’d never
been treated by them. I didn’t know where else to look. He was an
only child and both his parents were killed in the Brooklyn Blast.
All the time he stayed here, he never had a visitor.”

“He receive any mail here?”

“Some stuff he bought online, but that’s it.
Disability welfare was direct deposit.” LeVeen opened a drawer and
took out an ashtray with a joint lying in it. “Want some? I need to
unwind after a day on the computer. I’m expecting a young lady in a
few minutes.” LeVeen switched on the stove fan, lit the joint and
exhaled his first puff into the fan intake.

“He ever mention a girl called Marielle? They were
Facebook friends.” I refused his offer of the joint but it smelled
good.

“No.”

“Well, she’s gone missing. That’s why I need to talk
to him. Her family wants her found.”

“Is there a reward?”

“Could be something. Not to mention, a good karma
credit for your next life.”

“Tell that to my landlord.” LeVeen took another
puff. “Look, I don’t know where Eddie went and I don’t know any
Marielle. But if you want to look through the stuff he left behind,
feel free.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Cardboard box full of junk. Books, mostly.”

“Let’s have a look.”

LeVeen took me to the spare room and pulled a
cardboard box from the closet. I went through it. A few music books
–
Learn to Play
Blues Guitar
,
101 Chords and
Riffs
, and more of the same. Plus half a dozen chess books –
The Game of Kings
,
Think like a Grandmaster
, etc –
and a wooden chess set.

I found a folder of pencil sketches – mostly
long-legged women being humped by giant spiders. Pretty nasty
stuff. I liked long-legged women, but spiders were definitely
boner-shrinkers.

I also found a menu flyer from
Luna Deli
,
with a few items circled. I showed it to LeVeen.

“Eddie followed a weird diet of oatmeal, yogurt,
nuts, chick peas and sardines. Twice a week, he’d order a sandwich
from that deli. Sardine paste with hummus on whole wheat, or oyster
paste and Spanish onion on pumpernickel. He called them Gonad
Burgers, his late-night snack.”

“All those foods are high in Omega-3. Certainly a
good diet for sexual performance.”

“Well, he and Five-Finger Mary must have been having
a great time, because he had absolutely no social life.
Luna
Deli
let him run a tab which he paid monthly when his
disability payment arrived. I even went to see them, asked if he
was still ordering the same takeout, where it was being delivered,
but they hadn’t heard from him in six months. Ironically, he’d paid
his tab with them, but stiffed
me
for the rent. If I ever
see him on the street, I’ll throw him under another truck, finish
the job this time.”

The door chimed a riff from the Beatles’
Paperback Writer
.

“Here comes Venus on the half-shell.” LeVeen pressed
the buzzer and spoke into the intercom, “Come on up, babe.”

“This deli still in business?” I scanned the flyer
for the address.

“Check it out. Houston and Essex, I think.”

“You wouldn’t have a picture of Eddie, would
you?”

“No, he was like an African bushman, refused to have
his picture taken.”

“Give me a description.”

“That’s easy. He looked just like Tom Cruise.”

“No kidding.”

“God’s truth.
Fourth of July
all over again.
Except angrier.”

I gave him some money and my coordinates. “Let me
know if he turns up. Right away, night or day. There’ll be
something in it for you.”

As I passed the elevator, a leggy redhead in high
heels and a slinky dress emerged and headed in the direction of
#505. As I entered the stairwell I heard a female squeal
“Ronneeee!”

I put on my eMask as I descended the stairs. The
only insects I saw were half a bushel of withered silverfish on the
ground floor. Sweet. The place deserved a Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval in my books. Dead bugs were a sign of a well-run
building.

Chapter 18

I returned to the underground garage and recovered
my ride. Except for a toxic spill of cat vomit on the front hood,
the Charger was intact. I used some newspaper and windshield washer
fluid to clean the mess off the car. It looked like a handful of
cockroaches swimming in clotted cream.

Between the bugs, stray cats and dogs left homeless
by fleeing residents, lower Manhattan was a Darwinian experiment
gone sour. Cats ate roaches and silverfish, and got sick on boric
acid and DDT. Dog packs foraged for food, killing rats, pigeons and
cats. Cars ran over dogs and cats, their carcasses eaten by rats.
When the rats died, the roaches closed the loop on it all.

I started the car and locked the doors. As I was
leaving the underground garage, I almost ran into two derelicts
hobbling crookedly down the sidewalk, holding onto each other like
assigned partners in a three-legged foot race. Bowery BFFs.

I drove up Essex to Houston and found Luna Deli. It
had a big neon sign with a crescent moon in blue tubing. I parked
the car in a delivery zone a few doors away, put the four-way
flasher on and trotted down the sidewalk to the deli.

The smell of smoked meat took me back. Gwen and I
used to favor a deli on Neptune Avenue with a sidewalk terrace.
Before Lily came along we used to go there for Saturday lunch. The
sandwiches were so big we’d often split one and bag the other to
eat on Sunday. We’d each have a beer and watch the neighborhood
stroll by, nobody running for their lives, just a typical Saturday
afternoon in the good old days.

“If you can’t make up your mind, buddy, step back
and let me serve someone else.”

I blinked away some tears and stared at an old guy
in an apron with a white cap cocked on his head like some demented
sailor.

“Sorry. Chopped liver on rye with Swiss.”

He buttered a slice of rye and flung a scoop of
chopped liver at it.

“You ever see a guy in here, looked like Tom Cruise
in a wheelchair?” I asked him.

“Used to. Not in a while, though.” He spread the
liver and covered it with two slices of cheese.

“This your regular shift?”

“Days and evenings.” He slapped another slice of rye
on top and knifed the sandwich in two.

“You’re open all night, aren’t you?”

“One of the perks of being an owner, I no longer
work graveyard shift.” He wrapped the sandwich in waxed paper and
handed it to me.

I fetched a small can of Heineken from the cooler
and paid. Back in the car, I drank the beer and ate half the
sandwich before a delivery truck started making rude with the horn.
I drove down the block until I spotted a garbage can where I
ditched the beer can. The police were so busy with property crime,
they scarcely bothered with traffic stops, but just in case I got
pulled over, I didn’t need a suspension over a DUI.

I went across town on Houston and down Varick into
Tribeca. Normally I’d have used my travel time to gather more intel
on the Avatar Clinic but, without my iFocals, I was distinctly
handicapped. I’d have to go in naked.

I idled down Laight looking for the clinic. Once
upon a time, Tribeca had been industrial, but late in the 20th
century its warehouses had been converted to lofts for well-heeled
artists who liked the Village, or investment types who worked at
the World Trade Center. After the Brooklyn Blast, the rich had
decamped to less radioactive climes, but I’d no idea how the
demographics had changed. Once the pop stars moved out, who’d
entered in their wake?

Most buildings were three to eight stories, many
with garage doors for vehicle access. On the corner of Laight and
Collister was a red-brick three-story building with a large brass
plaque that read
Avatar
Clinic
. I found a metered
parking spot a block away and walked back.

I rang the doorbell and got buzzed into the foyer.
In a waiting area were four chairs around a coffee table consisted
of a glass case with a display of mounted butterflies. A large
picture of bees in a rose bush added color to one wall.

A receptionist in her twenties monitored my
approach. When I got closer I saw she was actually staring at a
wall of glass that separated her workstation from the waiting area.
Closer still, I saw it was a see-through display panel on which a
daytime drama was playing.

I recognized a B-list actress from LA who’d hired me
two years ago to find her only brother who’d gone missing in the
Brooklyn Blast. A real-life soap opera with a happy ending, since
I’d eventually found the brother in a Brooklyn mass burial complex,
his name misspelled in a bureaucratic typo that had never been
corrected on his driver’s license. Closure in the end, and exactly
what my client had prayed for, since there’d been a sizable family
estate swinging in the wind, and her brother’s corpse delivered the
icing on her inheritance cake.

“May I help you?” The daytime drama evaporated like
smoke.

“I’m looking for a young lady.” I pressed a printed
photo of Marielle up against the glass.

She shook her head. “I don’t recognize her.”

“Her name’s Marielle, but she might have used a
different name.”

“What’s the problem?”

“She’s underage and doesn’t have parental consent to
do whatever she’s thinking of having done here at your clinic.”
That was at least half true, and if she didn’t have Marielle’s file
on hand, she had no way to disprove the other half.

She slipped on a pair of goggles and rested her chin
on her fists a moment to study me. Suspecting she was filming me, I
smiled for the camera. She didn’t smile back. She was one of those
blondes whose skin tone was white as country snow, with blood like
ice water. She brushed her hair back, dipped her head and tapped
her fingers across a touch-screen keyboard. She could have used
voice-command to do whatever she was doing, but she probably
figured this was more secure, since I had little hope of following
her upside-down keyboard strokes.

Her fingers paused a moment, then danced again.
Finally she turned her face up to me, and this time she did smile.
I saw white teeth so perfect I suspected she’d never smoked a
cigarette or drunk a cup of tea. This generation, some of them got
all their fixes from patches.

“Sorry, Mr. Savage, the young lady in question is
not under our care. And incidentally, we do not entertain inquiries
from the public, no matter whether family members or their private
investigators, unless accompanied by a subpoena.” Letting me know
by name and profession that she’d pegged me with facial
recognition.

“If you don’t entertain such inquiries, why tell me
anything?”

“I’m doing you a favor. Save you the stress of
thinking we’re hiding something from you.”

I refused to be shooed away so easily. “Who’s in
charge here?”

“Aside from me, you mean?” She smiled again.
Apparently, she’d gone to Miss Meanie’s School for Rude Girls.

“Your Director of Operations. Chief Surgeon.
Sawbones-at-Large.”

“You mean Dr. Globik? He’s not in.”

“How do I know you’re not just stonewalling me?”

Her fingers tickled her keyboard. She jerked her
chin to look over my shoulder. The picture of bees in the waiting
area was actually a flat-screen monitor. I saw some people on a
podium. The view switched to what looked like a gargantuan painted
toad on snow tires. The camera continued a slow pan around a
conference room with about fifty people in attendance.

“What’s that about?”

“Dr. Globik is giving a news conference at the
MediaTech Center.”

“Where’s that?”

“Pier Twenty-Six.” She extended her arm east and
hooked her hand south. “Just a few blocks away. They’re due to kick
off on the hour. If you hurry you can probably just make it.”

The daytime drama appeared like a translucent
curtain between us. Three actors, my half-naked former client one
of them, cavorted on a bed. The receptionist stared at it, and
therefore, through me. Even I couldn’t compete with a threesome, so
I left.

Chapter 19

I drove to Pier 26. A display at the media center’s
front door said entrance was limited to City officials and holders
of valid Press cards. As one of my covers, I carried business cards
that said
Keith Savage, Hudson Howler
. The
Howler
was
an online tabloid for whom journalism was little more than dumpster
diving to identify the drinking habits of public figures.