JM03 - Red Cat (2 page)

Her name was Vera, and when she wasn’t checking people in and out of Hendry’s, she was a film student at NYU. She was black Irish, wry and elfin, and red-cheeked from the cold when we met at a Star-bucks on Houston Street during her break. I bought her a latte and gave her the description of Wren that David had given me: about five foot nine and about thirty years old, with thick auburn hair to the shoulders, fair skin, brown eyes, narrow face, longish nose, wide mouth, slim, athletic build, soft voice, no jewelry, plain but expensive clothes, in mostly black and gray. I didn’t mention the smiling red cat tattooed very high up on the inner part of her left thigh, or the skimpy French underwear, or the birthmark shaped something like Florida on her ass. Vera shook her head.

“Could be half our feckin’ guests,” she said. “And if you tell me she’s twenty pounds underweight and halfway a junkie, it could be two thirds.”

“You get many who want rooms for only an hour or two?”

Vera grinned crookedly. “You’d be surprised,” she said.

“If I gave you three dates, you couldn’t take just a quick glance at your computer?”

She laughed. “Sure, if you could just pick up the fees for my last two semesters in school.”

“How about just one date then?” I asked. “November eighteenth.” It was the one time David and Wren had met someplace other than Hendry’s. “You recall anything happening at the hotel that day?”

Vera squinted into her cup for a moment and nodded. “Sure— that whole week— and it was a feckin’ zoo, I’ll tell ya. They were givin’ out music video awards or some such shite uptown, and we were booked solid.”

I thanked Vera, who gave me one more crooked grin, shook my hand, and left. I stayed put, nursing my drink and thinking.

I hadn’t fared much better yesterday, when I’d spent most of the morning trying to put some meat on the bones of David’s story. He hadn’t made it easy.

“It isn’t enough to know I met her on-line?” he’d said. “What do you need the particulars for?”

“Gee, I don’t know, David— maybe on the off chance they could help me locate her.”

“I don’t see how.”

“You don’t need to see how. That’s what you hired me for.”

“ ‘Hired’ is the key word there— it means you work for me.”

We went around like that for a while and finally David relented. He was sullen at first but eventually a note of pride crept into his voice, and I realized he was quietly pleased with his shrewdness.

He could quote Wren’s posting on MetroMatchPoint.com, the dating website he’d used to find her, almost word for word. “Slim, leggy redhead, twenties, healthy, tasteful, and discreet, seeks professional man 35?55 for casual meeting. Manhattan only, downtown preferred.” He’d sent a note to the e-mail address in the ad, and had established what he called his “ground rules.”

“Half the people on these sites who claim to be women, aren’t— so before I waste any time, I get a photo.” I didn’t quite gulp.

“Tell me you haven’t been mailing your picture around the web, David.”

He gave me a get real look. “For chrissakes, no. I get photos from them; I don’t send anything out.”

“A little lopsided, isn’t it? What if the other party doesn’t agree?”

“So be it.” David shrugged. “If she won’t play by my rules, I move on.”

“And how do you know the photos you get are for real? What’s to stop someone sending you a picture of someone else entirely?”

“It happens, but that’s why I insist on a first meeting at Third Uncle.” I knew the place; it was a cafГ© on Charlton Street, off Varick. “It has that huge front window and you can see everyone in the place from the sidewalk. If I like the view, I go inside and take a closer look. If I don’t, I just keep walking.” The voice of authority.

“So you’ve never been fooled?”

He squinted at me. “Fooled how?”

“You didn’t see The Crying Game?”

“Jesus,” David said. His face wrinkled in disgust. “You think this is some kind of joke?”

“No joke, David. It’s a big city, and full of all sorts of people.”

“Fuck you. I know the difference between a man and a woman.”

“Whatever. Exactly how many of these look-sees have you gone on anyway?”

His face went blank and his voice dead flat. “You have more questions about Wren, or not?” he asked.

“Let’s hear those messages,” I said.

David blanched. “I deleted the ones she left on my office voicemail and at home,” he said, and he pressed some keys on his tiny phone. “But I saved the ones on my cell.” He held the phone to his ear and then passed it to me. His hand was shaking a little as he did it. In a moment I understood why.

There were three messages and they were brief but operatic. Wren’s voice was quiet, educated, and medium-deep, and when it wasn’t steeped in anger or bile or plain craziness, it was pleasant, if a little tired sounding. The first one was the least strident.

“David— it is David, isn’t it?— it’s Wren calling. It’s been so long, David, and I missed you over the holidays. I thought of calling you at home, but then I thought that might be awkward with Stephanie, so I left you a message at the office. When I didn’t hear back I thought you might be taking a break from work, and not checking your voicemail. I imagine you could use a vacation, considering how busy you must be at Klein & Sons— your new job and all. Are you traveling? Are you someplace warm? I wish I could join you in the sun, David. I want to see you. Write me soon.”

If you didn’t know the context, there was something only slightly creepy in the way she kept repeating David’s name, and in her neediness. The volume went up in the second message, and so did the harpy quotient.

“It’s been two days and I haven’t heard from you. I know you’re in town, David— you were at that benefit last night, you and Stephanie. You suddenly seem to have so much time for her, David, and none at all for me. I never thought you would be cruel in this way, or so rude. But I won’t be ignored, David— and I won’t be disrespected. I want to see you, and if I don’t, I’ll keep calling. And who knows what number I’ll dial…or who will answer? Maybe your big brother or one of your other partners. Maybe your bitch wife.” Her voice was charged with venom at the end, and traveled through anguished, indignant, and imperious to get there. The third message had apparently been left after one of Wren’s phone conversations with David.

“You’re not picking up anymore, David? Well, fine— don’t. You were such a rude bastard when we spoke this morning— so nasty and cold— I’m not sure I want to talk to you just now anyway. I know you like talking dirty, but this was different, David. This was…brutal and coarse and not sexy at all. Tell me, do you talk that way to Stephanie? Does she like it? I’ll have to remember to ask.” There was a frightening slyness in Wren’s voice, and something almost triumphal too. She was in control and relishing her power.

The message ended and I looked at the cell phone display. “The call comes through as private,” I said, and handed the phone to David.

“Otherwise I would’ve looked her up myself,” he’d muttered. It wasn’t long after that he’d left, still white-faced.

I tossed Vera’s cup and my own into the trash, stepped out into the frost and glare, and headed west on Houston. An icy wind was blowing off the East River and it bullied me along in its rush to Jersey. Cold as it was, it felt good to be out in the air, good to walk. I hadn’t run since Thursday, and at some point over the weekend, a thick, logy feeling had settled behind my eyes and a plank of dull pain had fastened itself to my forehead. I felt slow and half hungover, and my failure yesterday to find hide or hair or the smallest feather of Wren on the MetroMatchPoint website had only reinforced my sense of being slightly stupid.

The e-mail address Wren used for her correspondence had led me nowhere. Like the one David used, it was provided free of charge by one of the big web search sites and was untraceable without a subpoena or a court order. We weren’t to that point yet, and in any event there was no reason to believe that Wren had been any more truthful in the information she’d provided to establish her account than my brother had been in establishing his own.

David had given me the keywords he’d used to find Wren’s posting on MetroMatchPoint: age 25?35; Manhattan; white; and the all-important casual and discreet. The search criteria had helped me cull a thousand women-seeking-men entries down to fewer than a hundred, but even so the list seemed endless. And, after the first couple of dozen, endlessly grim.

Some tried for sexy or funny, but their authors lacked the skill to carry it off in twenty-five words or less, and they came across as crude or incoherent or both. Most of the postings, though, aspired to nothing more than businesslike: a listing of the advertiser’s alleged physical attributes, and those she sought in a partner; a few words on specific restrictions or inclinations; and an e-mail address. These were no doubt useful as transactional devices, but the aggregate effect was one of grinding loneliness, and a bleak and relentless hunger. I’d tweaked and twisted David’s search criteria but found nothing remotely like Wren’s posting, and after three hours I’d called it a day.

A plastic shopping bag blew past me, and so did three pages of a Chinese newspaper and a Mexican takeout menu and a hundred or so cigarette butts— and so, eventually, did my headache. By the time I crossed Sullivan Street, my ears were numb but my brain was full of chilly oxygen.

It was late for breakfast and too early for lunch and I could see through the big window that David had found so useful that Third Uncle was nearly empty. There were a couple of skinny girls behind the steel counter, ministering to the espresso machines, and a pair of drowsy dilettantes paging listlessly through the Times at a steel-topped table up front, and no one else in the black-and-white-tiled room. I went inside and my face burned in the sudden warmth.

I sat at the counter and hung my coat on the back of the stool and ordered a hot chocolate. By the time I was halfway through it I’d discovered that the girls were only dimly aware of their customers, even the ones right in front of them, and in any event they had worked there only since November. It had been a long shot, and I was only slightly disappointed.

I checked my watch. I had nearly an hour until my meeting, and the dilettantes had abandoned their newspaper and their table. I carried my coat and my hot chocolate over and sat in a ragged patch of sunlight. One of the skinny girls put on a CD— Nellie McKay. I listened to the flex and twist of her clever voice, and scanned the front page, while the wind roiled the dust outside. The news was more of the same and all bad— a relentless slide backward and down, an inexorable slouching toward a new Dark Age. I was grateful to be following it with only half a mind. The other half was still reeling from what David had told me.

I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me: as my brother himself had observed, secrets were my stock-in-trade. As a PI, and as a cop before that, nearly all the people I met had something to hide, and often very big things— a drug habit, an offshore bank account, a lover or two, a husband or a wife, a whole secret family sometimes, with kids and fish and a secret mortgage on the secret house. Why should David be any different? Just because he was my brother? Just because I knew him, or thought I did? Though, of course, I didn’t.

Before he leaned on my intercom button a day ago, I would have said differently. I would’ve looked into his pale blue eyes, so like our mother’s, and said that I knew all I cared to about David March, and certainly all the important stuff— the prickly outer shell of disdain and disapproval; the prickly inner shell of smug superiority; the deeper layers of barely clothed ambition, impatient intelligence, and rigid self-discipline; and the clenched and thwarted core, so quick to take offense, so certain that the rewards that came his way were overdue and never quite enough, never quite his fair share. And I would have said that Stephanie was his perfect match, her ambition and self-satisfaction and ready reproach so well suited to his own. They met the world with the same sharp elbows and bitter mouths and appraiser’s eyes: a united if unappealing front, or so I’d thought. But what the hell did I know?

David’s questions played over again in my head. Do you think I’m stupid? No, not stupid, David, not even close, but maybe a little crazy— maybe more than a little. What kind of person do you think I am? Twenty-four hours later I still had no answer. That too familiar face had become a mask, and those blue eyes had gone suddenly opaque.

By the time I finished my hot chocolate and my browse through the newspaper, it was time to meet Victor Sossa.

The wind had quickened a knot or two, and my coat might have been sewn from cheesecloth for all the good it did on my walk to Lispenard Street. My face was brittle when I stepped into the minimalist lobby of the building just off Church Street, and my eyes were full of grit. Victor Sossa was there, inspecting a tiny crack in the polished stone floor and waiting for me.

Victor was somewhere in his fifties, a compact, muscular man with skin the color of light coffee. His face was wrinkled as a tobacco leaf, and his bald head was covered by a green knit Jets cap. His eyes were black and bright and skeptical. He looked at his watch and at me.

“You March?” he said. I nodded. “You’re right on time.” Wherever his accent had originated, it was now mostly from the Bronx.

Victor Sossa was the building’s nonresident manager— the super— and I’d gotten his name and number from the building’s managing agents. Victor and his crew tended to several properties in the neighborhood, all high-priced apartment houses converted a few decades ago from what had been warehouses and factories. Once upon a time, thirty or so years back, the building we were standing in had housed a textile company. More recently, on November 18— when Hendry’s was overflowing with rock stars— it was the spot where David and Wren had whiled away an afternoon. David could recall the address, and that the apartment was a large one-bedroom on the fourth floor, but he didn’t know the apartment number or its owner’s name. I was hoping Victor could help me out.

I had a little story for Victor about investigating an auto accident that had occurred on the eighteenth, and about trying to trace someone who might have witnessed the whole thing from the window of a fourth-floor apartment. He listened politely and nodded, but I’m not sure if it was my story he believed, or my fifty dollars. Either way, he smiled and told me what I wanted to know.