Falling Angel (13 page)

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “You call up saying you have to see me right away. Now that you’re here, you act like you’re doing me a favor.”

“Maybe I am doing you a favor.” She sat back and crossed her long legs, which wasn’t hard to take either. “You come around looking for Johnny Favorite and the next day a man gets killed. That’s not just a coincidence.”

“What is it then?”

“Look: the newspapers are making a lot of noise about voodoo this and voodoo that, but I can tell you straight out that Toots Sweet’s death didn’t have anything to do with Obeah, not a single, blessed thing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Did you see the pictures in the papers?”

I nodded.

“Then you know they’re calling those bloody scribblings on the wall ‘voodoo symbols’?”

Another silent nod.

“Well, the cops don’t know any more about voodoo than they do about red beans and rice! Those marks were supposed to look like veve, but it just isn’t so.”

“What’s veve?”

“Magic signs. I can’t explain their meaning to someone who’s not an initiate, but all that bloody trash’s got as much to do with the real thing as Santa Claus has to do with Jesus. I’ve been a mambo for years. I know what I’m talking about.”

I stubbed out my butt in a Stork Club ashtray left over from a long-dead love affair. “I’m sure you do, Epiphany. You say the marks are phony?”

“Not phony so much as, well, wrong. I don’t know how else to put it. Be like someone describing a baseball game and he kept calling a home run a touchdown. Get what I mean?”

I folded the copy of the
News
to page 3. Holding it so Epiphany could see, I pointed to the snakelike zigzags, spirals, and broken crosses in the photo. “Are you saying these look like voodoo drawings, ‘vévé,’ or whatever, but they’re used incorrectly?”

“That’s right. See that circle there, the one with the serpent swallowing its own tail? That’s Damballah, sure enough vévé, a symbol of the geometric perfection of the universe. But no initiate would ever draw it right next to Babako like that.”

“So, whoever drew those pictures at least knew enough about voodoo to know what Damballah or Babako looked like in the first place.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,” she said. “Did you know that Johnny Favorite was once upon a time mixed up with Obeah?”

“I know he was a hunsi-bosal.”

“Toots really did have a big mouth. What else do you know?”

“Only that Johnny Favorite was running around with your mother at the time.”

Epiphany made a face like tasting something sour. “It’s true.” She shook her head as if to deny it. “Johnny Favorite was my father.”

I sat very still, gripping the arms of my chair as her revelation washed over me like a giant wave. “Who all knows about this?”

“No one, ‘cept you and me and mama, and she’s dead.”

“What about Johnny Favorite?”

“Mama never told him. He was away in the army long before I was a year old. I told you the truth when I said we’d never met.”

“How come you’re opening up to me now?”

“I’m scared. There’s something about Toots’ death that has to do with me. I don’t know how or why, but I can feel it deep down in my bones.”

“And you think Johnny Favorite is mixed up in it somehow?”

“I don’t know what to think. You’re supposed to do the thinking. I figured you ought to know. Maybe it’ll help some.”

“Maybe. If you’re holding out on me, now would be the time to tell.”

Epiphany stared at her folded hands. “There’s nothing more to tell.” She stood up then, very brisk and efficient. “I must be going. I’m sure you have work to do.”

“I’m doing it right now,” I said, getting to my feet.

She collected her coat from the rack. “I trust you meant that stuff earlier, you know, about discretion.”

“Everything you told me is strictly confidential.”

“I hope so.” She smiled then. It was a genuine smile and not designed to get results. “Somehow, against all my better judgment, I trust you.”

“Thanks.” I started around the desk when she opened the door.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I can find my own way out.”

“You have my number?”

She nodded. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

“Call me even if you don’t.”

She nodded a second time and was gone. I stood at the corner of my desk, not moving until I heard the door to the outer room close behind her. In three steps, I grabbed my attaché case, wrestled my coat off the rack, and locked the office.

I waited with my ear to the outer door, listening for the self-service elevator opening and closing before I left. The hallway was empty. The only sounds were Ira Kipnis adding up a late tax return and the electric drone of Madame Olga removing unwanted hair. I sprinted for the fire stairs and took the steps three at a time on my way down.

TWENTY-FIVE

I beat the elevator by at least fifteen seconds and waited inside the stairwell with the fire door open just a crack. Epiphany walked past me out onto the street. I was right behind, following her around the corner and down into the subway.

She caught the uptown IRT local. I got on the next car in line and, as the train started to move, went outside and stood on the bucking metal platform above the coupling where I watched her through the glass in the door. She sat very primly with her knees tight together, staring up at the row of advertising above the windows. Two stops later, she got off at Columbus Circle.

She walked east along Central Park South, past the Maine Memorial topped with its seahorse-drawn chariot cast from the salvaged cannon of the sunken battleship. There were few pedestrians, and I stayed far enough back not to hear her heels tap on the hexagonal asphalt tiles bordering the park.

She turned downtown at Seventh Avenue. I watched her studying the entrance numbers as she hurried by the Athletic Club and the sculpture-encrusted Alwyn Court Apartments. At the corner of 57th Street, she was stopped by an elderly lady lugging a heavy shopping bag, and I lingered in the entrance of a lingerie shop while she gave directions, pointing back toward the park without seeing me.

I almost lost her when she darted across the two-way traffic a moment before the light changed. I was marooned at the curb, but she slowed her pace to scrutinize the shop numbers located along the side of Carnegie Hall. Even before the WALK sign turned green, I saw her pause at the far end of the block and go inside the building. I already knew the address: 881 Seventh. It was where Margaret Krusemark lived.

In the lobby, I watched the brass arrow above the righthand elevator come to rest at “11” as its sinistral twin descended. When the car door opened an entire string quartet got off, carrying their cased instruments. A delivery boy from Gristede’s with a carton box of groceries on his shoulder was the only other passenger going up. The delivery boy got off at the fifth floor. I told the operator, “Nine, please.”

I climbed the fire stairs to Margaret Krusemark’s floor, leaving the frenzied rhythm of a tap-dancing class behind. The soprano was still yodeling in the distance as I walked along the deserted hallway to the door wearing the brand of Scorpio.

I unsnapped my attaché case on the threadbare carpet. A bunch of dummy forms and papers in the accordion file on top made it look official, but underneath a false bottom I kept the tools of the trade. A layer of polyurethane foam held everything in place. Nestled there were a set of case-hardened burglar’s tools, a contact mike and miniaturized tape recorder, ten-power Lietz binoculars, a Minox camera with a stand for photographing documents, a collection of skeleton keys that cost me $500, nickel-steel handcuffs, and a loaded .38 Special Smith & Wesson Centennial with an Airweight alloy frame.

I got out the contact mike and plugged in the earphone. It was a nice piece of equipment. When I held the mike to the surface of the door, I heard everything that went on inside the apartment. If someone came along, I dropped the instrument in my shirt pocket, and the earphone looked like a hearing aid.

But no one came along. The soprano’s warbling echo blended with distant piano lessons in the empty hallway. Inside the apartment, I heard Margaret Krusemark say: “We were not the best of friends, but I had a great respect for your mother.” Epiphany’s mumbled reply was inaudible. The astrologer went on: “I saw quite a good deal of her before you were born. She was a woman of power.”

Epiphany asked: “How long were you engaged to Johnny?”

“Two-and-a-half years. Cream or lemon, my dear?”

It was obviously teatime again. Epiphany chose lemon and said: “My mother was his mistress throughout your engagement.”

“Dear child, don’t you think I was aware of that? Johnny and I had no secrets from each other.”

“Is that why you broke it off?”

“Our estrangement was strictly for the benefit of the press. We had our own private reasons for giving it out that we had broken up. In truth, we were never closer than during those final months before he went off to war. Our relationship was a peculiar one, I don’t deny it. I should hope that you are sufficiently sophisticated not to be swayed by bourgeois convention. Your mother certainly never was.”

“What could be more bourgeois than a
ménage ŕ trois
?”

“It was not a
ménage ŕ trois
! What do you think we were involved in, some hideous little sex club?”

“I’m sure I have not the faintest idea what you were involved in. Mama never mentioned you to me at all.”

“Why should she? As far as she was concerned, Jonathan was dead and buried. He was all that linked us.”

“But he’s not dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it.”

“Has someone been around asking questions about Jonathan? Child, answer me; all of our lives may depend upon it.”

“How?”

“Never mind how. There has been someone asking about him, hasn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just a man. Ordinary.”

“Was he on the heavy side? Not fat exactly but overweight? Slovenly? By that I mean a sloppy dresser, wrinkled blue suit and shoes that need a shine. Full black mustache, closely cropped hair starting to go grey?”

Epiphany said: “Kind blue eyes. You notice them first.”

“Did he say his name was Angel?” Margaret Krusemark’s voice betrayed a strident urgency.

“Yes. Harry Angel.”

“What did he want?”

“He’s looking for Johnny Favorite.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t tell me why. He’s a detective.”

“A policeman?”

“No, a private detective. What is this all about?”

There was a faint clinking of china and then Margaret Krusemark said, “I’m not exactly sure. He was here. He didn’t say he was a detective; he pretended to be a client. I know this is going to seem very rude, but I must ask you to leave now. I have to go out myself. It’s urgent, I’m afraid.”

“Do you think we’re in danger?” Epiphany’s voice broke on that final word.

“I don’t know what to think. If Jonathan’s come back, anything could happen.”

“There was a man killed in Harlem yesterday,” Epiphany blurted. “A friend of mine. He knew Mama and Johnny, too. Mr. Angel had been asking him questions.”

A chair scraped against the parquet floor. “I’ve got to go now,” Margaret Krusemark said. “Come, I’ll get your coat, and we’ll ride down together.”

There was the sound of approaching footsteps. I pulled the contact mike from the door and yanked the earphone free, shoving the whole business into my coat pocket. With my attaché case tucked under my arm, I sprinted the length of the long hallway like Nashua in the homestretch. I hung onto the banister for balance and took the fire stairs four and five steps at a time.

It was too risky waiting for the elevator on the ninth floor, the odds of getting in the same car with the ladies too high, so I ran down the fire stairs all the way to the empty lobby. Gasping, I paused long enough to check the indicators over the elevators. The one on the left was going up, its partner coming down. Either way, they would be here in a moment.

I ran out onto the sidewalk and stumbled across Seventh Avenue without paying heed to the traffic. Once on the other side, I loitered near a cart selling hot pretzels at the curb, wheezing like some old geezer with emphysema. A governess wheeling a perambulator clucked sympathetically as she passed.

TWENTY-SIX

Epiphany and the Krusemark woman came out of the building together and walked half a block uptown to 57th Street. I strolled along the other side of the avenue, keeping abreast of them. At the corner, Margaret Krusemark kissed Epiphany fondly on the cheek like a maiden aunt bidding farewell to her favorite niece.

When the light changed, Epiphany started across Seventh Avenue in my direction. Margaret Krusemark waved frantically at passing taxis. A new Checker cab approached with its rooflight on, and I flagged it down, climbing inside before Epiphany had me spotted.

“Where to, mister?” a round-faced driver asked as he dropped the flag.

“Like to make a deuce above what it says on the meter?”

“Whatcha got in mind?”

“Tail job. Pull over for a minute in front of the Russian Tea Room.” He did as I asked and turned around in his seat to check me out. I gave him a glimpse of the honorary button pinned to my wallet and said: “See the dame in the tweed coat getting into the hack in front of Carnegie Hall? Don’t lose her.”

“A piece of cake.”

The other cab made an abrupt U-turn on 57th. We pulled the same maneuver without being too obvious and stayed half a block behind as they turned downtown on Seventh. Round-face caught my glance in the rearview mirror and grinned. “You promised a fin, right, mac?”

“A fin it is, if you don’t get spotted.”

“I’m too long in this game for that, mac.”

We continued down Seventh to Times Square, passing in front of my office before the other cab took a left and started east on 42nd Street. Dodging artfully through traffic, we kept close but not conspicuous, and the driver gunned it a little to beat a red light at Fifth when it looked like we might get left behind.