Jimmy and Fay (23 page)

I remember I was standing outside a busy chop-suey joint when I heard that bastard Roosevelt telling me that the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. What crap! I was not inspired.

When they came out of the last shop, a teahouse, I think, they were arguing. They kept their voices down, but I could tell they weren't agreeing with each other. In the end, it seemed like the old man agreed with the kid.

Young Sam said, “We know where this place is. It's not in the best neighborhood, but we ought to be all right in the middle of the day.”

“Sure, that's fine.” It's been my experience that in Chinatown, the later it gets, the better your chances of finding trouble, particularly if that's what you're looking for. It's like that in most parts of New York, come to think of it.

“And we'll have to pay,” he said.

“How much?”

“A dollar or two more, maybe three.”

I gave him three ones. The old man snatched the bills away from his hand, and we set off. It took maybe another twenty minutes on narrower streets, and through a big open market building filled with strung-up birds, smelly fish, butchered meat, and vegetables and other things I didn't know. We went all the way through to the back where Grandfather talked to a Chinaman in a black suit. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning against a door. The old man slipped him a bill. The Chinaman didn't look happy about me being there but let us through into an alley.

We followed it until we came to another guy. He got another dollar and let us through another door. That put us inside a building in a hallway. Until then, we'd been hurrying, but the old man motioned for us to slow down. I slipped the knucks on my right hand. The place might have been an apartment house or a rooming house. I could hear more radios through transoms but not the noises you get in a crowded place like Mother Moon's or a tenement. The cooking smells sure weren't the same either.

The old man led us to a door that opened onto a staircase, and the whispered argument with the kid started up again. The old man won that one. He pushed open the door, turned, and put a finger to his lips. We went slowly up narrow wooden steps. When the door closed behind us, it was almost completely dark and quiet. No more radios. We went up to the fifth floor where he pushed open a door to a short hall or landing with a freight elevator on one side and a metal door with three locks on the other. A dirty skylight overhead let in a little gray light.

The kid said, “Grandfather can open the door.”

“You're sure this is the place I'm looking for?”

The boy translated, and the old man spat a lot of words back at him. Blushing, Sam said, “A white man with a beard rents the room. He pays more not to let anyone else in. He brings women here. No Chinese, only white women. Do you want him to open the door?”

“Is he going to break it in with his cane?” I asked, and the old guy's eyebrows shot up. Yeah, I figured he knew English better than he let on, but I said to the kid, “Do these stairs go on up to the roof?”

They nodded.

“Okay, first we find out if there's anybody inside.”

We went up two more flights to another heavy door that was locked. Sam said the old guy could pick it for five. I told him to go ahead. There wasn't enough light to see anything, but I guess he worked by touch. I could hear the scratches of him working with metal picks. Less than a minute later, the door popped and we were on a flat gravel and tar roof in the shadow of a wooden water tank on metal legs. There was a big square skylight right in front of us. The one we'd seen from below was a few feet away. Sam and the old man edged toward the big skylight. I looked around.

The roof we were on was taller than any of the ones around it. A cracked wooden chair was under the water tank. Dozens of stubby hand-rolled cigarette butts littered the gravel around it. Looked like somebody had spent time there.

The peaked skylight was made of panes of wired glass that were cleaner than the smaller skylight. The edges of the metal frame were softened by thick coats of paint. I could see a gear wheel and ratchet mechanism that would open the glass panels, but the chain that would open it was gone and the two biggest gears were padlocked together. Even if you broke through a single pane, you couldn't open the skylight.

Down below us was Bobby's studio.

It took the old man a lot longer to work through the three locks on Bobby's door. I could tell that both he and Sam wanted to go inside, but I told them to wait outside. Hell, they'd done it enough times to me that day.

The loft was a lot like Bobby's workroom in the Chelsea with a cluttered bench attached to one wall. It was piled with big light bulbs, electrical cables, and tools. Pinned up on the wall over it were the drawings Daphne told me about, jungle scenes of dinosaurs and Kong fighting. But the first thing I noticed, right in the middle of the room, was the big black hand the girl was on in the last picture in the book. It was made out of lumber and wire and covered with black canvas and matted carpeting.

There were a lot of lights and screens mounted on metal stands facing the hand, and a wheeled platform with a tripod that looked like it was meant for a camera. Four fake tree trunks with leafy branches were behind the hand and there was a canvas flat painted to look like a jungle behind the tree trunks.

The fake stone columns that Nola Revere had been tied to were on their sides against one wall. I could see that they were made of canvas and plywood tacked to two-by-fours. The little table and a section of the wall in the diner scene were on the other side of the jungle flat. The white shower stall was in a corner.

At the end of the workbench was a mirror with lights around it and a lot of cosmetics.

I walked around, looking at all of it, and I realized that Bobby must have shot the whole picture right there. The backgrounds and props for all the photographs I'd seen in the book were in that room. Except for the one he took on top of the Empire State Building. How did that figure in?

You see, the one thing Bobby told me the night before that I didn't believe was that he made his movies in a Chinatown loft. I believed he was telling the truth when he said that the book was a come-on to get guys worked up over his next picture, just like the real movie guys did. But if he shot moving pictures of those scenes, how could he do it in one place? That seemed impossible to me. Now I knew, and I felt like a dope.

I tore a page from my notebook, went over to the makeup mirror, and wrote him a note.

Bobby,

Nice place. Hope to see one of your pictures real soon.

—J

I turned the mirror lights on so he'd notice the note and slid it between the mirror and the frame. Give him something to think about next time he came by. I was patting myself on the back for being such a clever son of a bitch when I noticed the dress.

It was a filmy thing crumpled up on the stool in front of the mirror. Light blue with a gold braided rope at the waist. Like the rest of the stuff, it was something I'd seen in the book, in the last picture. Nola Revere was wearing it when she was tied to the pillars and the guy in the gorilla suit was threatening her. The dress had been ripped open at the sleeves and from the neck almost to the hem. When I held it up, I saw that the material in the middle was stuck together in a rusty red knot.

What the hell did that mean? It gave me a nasty, greasy feeling, but at the same time, I knew that everything in that loft was part of an act, a trick to make me think that the phony thing I was seeing was real.

But that didn't make my stomach feel any better. I took one more look around the place and left.

Back on the landing, the old man charged me another five to relock the door. Maybe I didn't need to do it but, hell, a little breaking and entering between old friends is one thing. Not locking up after yourself is impolite.

Getting out of the place was easier than getting in. We went back through the alley and the open-air market, and from there it was only a couple of blocks to streets I knew. Going back uptown on the El, I thought over the stuff I'd seen in the loft and everything Bobby said the night before. I could see how most of it was part of the same story.

Bobby went off to Hollywood to learn how to make movies. He came back here as Oscar Apollinaire and impressed his fellow art lover Peter Wilcox to bankroll top-drawer stag films that he copied from popular Hollywood pictures. Somewhere the ex-vice cop Trodache was involved. Maybe he blackmailed women into performing. Then he and Bobby parted company on bad terms. But he still knew about Bobby's version of
Kong
, and he got his hands on a copy of the promotional book. When he found out that Miss Wray was going to be in town for the premiere, he used the book to pry six Gs from the RKO guys. But who was the guy in the Fifth Avenue mansion and what did he want? Maybe he was somebody who worked for Wilcox. Or maybe he used to work for Wilcox. Maybe he and Trodache got canned together and were getting back at their old bosses.

I was still working on that when I got off the train and walked back to the speak. I wasn't dressed for work, but I thought I'd check in before I cleaned up. I was just about to cross Ninth Avenue when I saw the kid, Trodache's dim-witted partner, on the sidewalk across from my front door. He was wearing an overcoat with the collar turned up, and he had his cap pulled down low over his eyes. Given what I'd done to Trodache the night before, it figured the kid wasn't there to give me a Good Citizenship award. But, hell, he could wait.

I turned at the corner and went to the alley that runs behind the speak. I let myself in through the back gate and the back door. The crowd was light for a Saturday afternoon. Connie was behind the bar. I went around to the business side where we could talk in private.

“Listen,” I said to her, “tell Fat Joe there's a kid outside, the same kid who was in here the other night with that guy, you remember, the ones who gave you the willies. Yeah, well, the kid's hanging around across the street. Tell Fat Joe to keep an eye on him.”

“What if he wants to come in?”

“Not now, maybe later. Anything else?”

“Yes.” She gave me a big phony smile. “Your friend Daphne is waiting in your office.”

Chapter Twenty

Daphne had helped herself to a shot of the absinthe-laced rum. She was sitting on my divan in a tight silvery gray dress that showed off a lot of leg and cleavage. Her hair was done up more than it had been at her place on Gay Street. But she wasn't giving me the full treatment that had made her so popular when she was at Polly's. I took off my hat and coat and sat behind my desk and enjoyed the view.

Daphne knocked back half the rum. “She's in trouble, isn't she? Nola. What the hell's going on, really going on?”

“Why don't you have a drink, Daphne? Oh, I see you already got one. I told you what's going on. Nola posed for some dirty pictures. Some people wanted to know more about them and they hired me to look into it. I did.”

“No, there's more to it than that. I talked to Cynthia at Polly's. She says the pictures have something to do with that moving picture everybody's talking about, the jungle movie. What gives?”

She wasn't slurring her words, but I thought she probably wasn't used to anything as strong as the rum, and she was taking it neat. Most of the times I'd seen Daphne drinking, she had wine, and most of that was at Polly's, so it was probably apple juice.

I said, “It's hard to explain. Let me show you,” and opened the safe. I took out the book and sat next to her on the divan as she looked through it. She flipped through the pages fast, her eyes wide, and when she finished, she tossed it onto the table like it was burning her fingers. “I'll be screwed, blued, and tattooed, the son of bitch Apollinaire got
her
to do it.”

“Yeah, that's what it looks like. A couple of guys had the idea that she looked so much like the actress in the big movie that they could threaten the studio with bad publicity if these pictures ever got out.”

Daphne snorted. “That's ridiculous. She doesn't look anything like Fay Wray. I do, but she doesn't, that's why he wanted me first.”

“Sure it is. The guy behind it is an ex-vice cop named Trodache. Know him?”

“Only by reputation. The cocksucker got canned two or three years ago. Does he have anything to do with Nola?”

“Maybe, but I don't think so. I got the idea he doesn't know who she is. He really believes the girl in the book is Fay Wray, from the real movie. Do you know where Nola is?”

“No, that's why I came here, to find out what you know.”

Daphne said that after I left her place, she started worrying about Nola. She hadn't really thought about her since she moved to Gay Street, but after what I said, she got guilty about it. She and Nola had been close. Even if Nola left the city, she'd let Daphne know about it. But Daphne moved out of Polly's about the same time Nola left, so maybe the girl didn't know how to get in touch. But when Daphne talked to Cynthia, she learned that nobody had heard anything from Nola. Then Cynthia told Daphne she'd figured out that the dirty pictures I showed her had something to do with
King Kong
, and Daphne got more worried.

“Now, after looking at the book, I'm really scared. What if Oscar didn't tell her about screwing the nigger until it was too late? What would he do to her?” She looked and sounded like she really was concerned for Nola. Until then, I'd figured she was trying to play an angle I didn't understand, but that wasn't it.

“I don't know what's happening,” I said, “not all of it anyway, but maybe I can help you. You said this Oscar Apollinaire took you to see his ‘silent partner' in the Grand Central Building. Tell me everything you can remember about that day, the guy, the meeting, everything. First, was he a young guy or was he older?”

“Older. He didn't say much, but his voice was deep and he was . . . assured and confident. Whoever he is, he's used to giving orders and getting what he wants.”