Mask Market (13 page)

“I still don’t see a problem.”

“Well,
I
do,” she said, emphatically. “I could get…well, a lot of money for that place, if I was to sell it now. In two or three years, it could be worth a lot more…but it could also be worth a lot less. If I sold now, I’d have a big pot of cash.”

“You’d
need
a big pot of cash if you wanted to keep living in this town.”

“That’s just it,” she said, regretfully. “But if I had a place to stay, I could do it. I’d only need a couple, three years here, working, then I could go back home…with enough to live on forever, I bet.”

“Where’s home, Wyoming?”

“No, silly. I’m from a little town in North Carolina. I haven’t been back since—oh, I don’t even remember—but my daddy left me a little place when he passed on. There’s people living there now. Renters, I mean. It’s not a big house, but it’s got some land around it. I could be happy there…especially after this city. I know I could.”

“I never picked up an accent,” I said.

“Well, you better not, all the voice lessons I paid for,” she said, turning her bruised-peach lips into a practiced pout. “When I came to the city, I was just a girl, not even old enough to vote. I was going to be an actress. Everyone back home told me I was a dead ringer for Barbara Eden—when she was Jeannie, I mean—and I was dumb enough to listen.”

“You do favor her,” I said, gamely.

“You’re sweet, Lew,” she said, not diverted. “But I know that’s not going to be for me, not now.”

“Things didn’t work out?”

“I didn’t have any talent,” she said, soft and blunt at the same time. “This so-called agent I had told me to change my name—the only part I was ever going to get with a name like Loyal Lee Jenkins was if they remade
The Beverly Hillbillies
—so I did. A little. But that didn’t make any difference. Casting directors would see my pictures—oh, did I have to work to pay for
those
—and I’d get calls, but as soon as I opened my mouth, that was it.”

“Your accent?”

“Well, I
thought
it was my accent, but I ground that rock into powder…and that
still
didn’t change anything. I tried and tried for years until I got the message. You know what it comes down to, baby? I’m not fashionable anymore.”

“You? Come on!”

“You’re thinking of the shoes, aren’t you? There’s a lot more to being fashionable than buying things, Lew. You know those jeans everybody’s wearing now? They’re not built for girls like me. I work out like a fiend, but I can’t change my shape.”

“Why would you want to?”

She turned her big eyes into searchlights, scanning the terrain of my face for a few seconds. Whatever she found must have satisfied her, because she nodded as if agreeing with something. “I remember, once, this man who wanted me to pose for him,” she said. “He told me I had the classic American hourglass figure. I was thinking about that just this morning, looking in the mirror. And you know what, Lew? No matter how tiny the waist of an hourglass, the sand still drops through it. Running out. I have to start thinking about my future.”

“Your apartment.”

“My apartment,” she agreed. “Now, I told you some truth about myself, even if it was embarrassing. So can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you married?”

I had been expecting that one for weeks. “No,” I told her. “Well, I guess that’s not a hundred percent. I’ve been separated for years, waiting for her damn lawyers and mine to get together on some financial issues.”

“You have kids?”

“No.”

“And that one
is
a hundred percent?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, shrugging my shoulders to show she was being absurd.

“When you say ‘separated,’ you mean physically, too, don’t you?”

“Well,” I said, seeing where she was headed, to block the exit before she got there, “it’s not that simple. I own a brownstone. That is,
we
own a brownstone. The lawyers made it clear that the one who moves out is the one who gets the short end of the stick, so we’re both still there. We live on separate floors, so we’re not even roommates. Sometimes I don’t even catch sight of her for weeks. But I’ve got so much of my money tied up in that place, I’m not leaving. And neither is she.”

“So you sleep there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And that’s why you can’t bring me to your place? Because that would be, like, adultery, right? And that would make your wife’s case better.”

“That’s right,” I said, wondering how Loyal was such an expert on the topic…for about a second.

“But if you had a friend who let you stay at their place anytime you wanted, for as long as you wanted, I’ll bet you’d like that just fine.”

“I guess.”

“I mean, a friend who’d just clear out and disappear. So, say, if your
girl
friend wanted to spend some time with you…”

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Well, you
should.
Because it could solve both our problems in one jump,” Loyal said. Breathlessly, because all her breath had dropped into her cleavage.

“I’m not following you,” I said. Stalling, because I was.

“You wouldn’t want to rent an apartment in your name,” she said, leaning forward and licking a trace of something off her lips. “But
I
could rent one, couldn’t I? Then I could rent out my co-op, have a place to stay while I keep my eye on the market, and you’d have the best setup in the world, too.”

For three grand a month, I could have a
lot
of things,
I thought, but kept it off my face. “That could get tricky,” I said, still looking for an opening.

“You mean you would have to go back to your place and spend the nights? That’s no big deal, honey. That’s what you do now, anyway. If I had my own place, like we’re talking about, I could be ready for you anytime you wanted.”

Like
you’re
talking about,
I thought. “There might be a way,” I said aloud. “But it would depend on some things working out.”

“I’ll do anything,” Loyal said, lips slightly parted in abject sincerity.

I
met Pepper the next morning, in the lobby of an “I’m cool, but are
you
?” hotel on West Fifty-second. It’s perfect for a man in my line of work. The people who hang out there put in so much mirror time that their observational skills have atrophied from disuse. And the doorman doesn’t come on duty until after dark, when his outfit works better.

“What?” Pepper said, as she sat down on one of the quasi-sofas artfully scattered near the revolving door. Mick stood behind her right shoulder.

“Daniel Parks…?” I began. Got a blank stare for my efforts, kept going: “He was gunned down a little while back. Made the papers. First he wasn’t ID’ed. When they released his name, there was nothing else, except for the usual filler. Then I read in a gossip column that his wife had sued him for divorce just before it happened. Named another woman.”

Pepper turned and shot Mick a look that would have terrorized a gorilla.

“The gossip columns have trollers,” I said. “They root through the bins in Supreme Court, looking for celebrities’ names. Lawsuits, restraining orders, divorce filings—stuff like that. This guy’s name wouldn’t be on their hit list until he
got
hit, which is probably why it didn’t make the columns before now.”

Pepper rolled her eyes dramatically in a “Tell me something I don’t know” gesture.

“That’s one possibility,” I said, unfazed. “The other is that a cop leaked the info. Some of them have a standing arrangement with the gossip boys.”

“So?”

“So I need to find out what was in the actual complaint, Pepper. Supposedly, the wife named the other woman—they called her ‘Ms. X’ in the column, which means either they don’t know or she’s not famous—and that’s info I need. Plus anything else she charged him with—”

“Like?”

“Like, especially, anything to do with money.”

“Why can’t you just go down to the courthouse and—?”

“I guarantee that’s all sealed up by now. And if it’s not, it’s a baited trap, and the cops will be all over anyone who goes looking.”

“So you want
us
to do it?”

“Pepper, I know you don’t think much of me, but I’m sure you don’t think I’m stupid, okay? Wolfe—”

Mick made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a threat.

“I know
she
still has friends on the force,” I went on, nothing to lose.

“Friends do favors for friends,” Pepper said, flatly. “What you want, it’s not that sort of thing.”

“I know what you’re saying. I know money won’t do this. All I’m asking you is to ask
her,
all right?”

“Don’t call us,” she said, getting to her feet.

Mick glided out behind her, his broad back covering her like a steel cape.

T
he calendar said spring, but instead of blossom-bringing showers, the city stayed mired in dry cold. I never considered trying the co-op on West End. Parks was the source of that address, so he’d already worked it over long before he asked Charlie Jones to find him a tracker. Anyway, the info CD he had given me didn’t say anything about the girl I had known as Beryl Preston being married, or even living with someone, much less having kids.

A three-bedroom in that neighborhood would fetch a fortune for the owner—if the co-op board in her building allowed owners to rent out their units. But the Battery Park apartment was a condo. It wouldn’t have a board. Or a doorman.

Getting around this town isn’t complicated. You need to go north-south, there’ll be a subway someplace close, get you there quick enough…on days when its crumbling innards aren’t showing their age. You want to go east-west, you’re better off walking. I could spot most crosstown buses a couple of avenues and still catch them before they got to the next river. Battery Park is a nice walk from where I live, but not in bitter weather. And not when I’m working.

All I had for the pits who guarded my Plymouth was a few sawdust-and-pork-products wieners I picked up from a street vendor, but the beasts went for them like they were filet mignon. Or an enemy’s throat.

Every time I came, I got another micromillimeter closer to patting one of the females, an orca-blotched beauty who had begun twitching her tail at my approach a few months ago. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said to her. She’s the only one I ever talk to. She cocked her head, gave me a look I couldn’t read, then went back inside her house.

The Plymouth fired right up. I let the big pistons glide through the engine block on their coat of synthetic oil for a couple of minutes, waiting for the temperature gauge to show me signs of life. Then I motored over to the West Side Highway and turned left.

The ride lasted just long enough for James Cotton’s cover of the immortal Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart.” Blues covers aren’t the bullshit “sampling” rappers do, stealing and calling it “respect.” When a bluesman covers another artist’s song, he’s not just paying dues, he’s paying tribute. From the moment I’d caught Son Seals live in a little club in Chicago years ago, I’d wished he would cover “Goin’ Down Slow,” following the trail of giants like Howling Wolf and Big Bob Hite. But before that ever happened, he went down himself. Diabetes, I heard.

I found the complex easy enough; it was only a few blocks west of the blast zone from where the Twin Towers had fallen. Supposedly, the air around what tourists call “Ground Zero” is still full of microparticles from the atomized glass of all those exploded windows. I don’t know what effect stuff like that has on your lungs, but it hadn’t changed the asking—and getting—prices for lofts in the neighborhood. In this city, you could build apartments on top of a nuclear reactor and they’d be full by the weekend.

The gate to the parking lot wasn’t manned. A speaker box sat on a metal pole at the entrance. I hit the button, told the distorted voice coming through the grille that I was William Baylor, EPA, there to do some ambient atmosphere sampling.

I couldn’t tell if they understood a word I said, but the gate opened. I backed the Plymouth into the far corner of an open lot and climbed out. I was just taking a six-dial meter with two carrying handles and “EPA” stenciled across its side out of the trunk when a short, broad-chested Latino in a dark blue private-cop uniform strolled up.

“You’re the guy from…?” he said.

“EPA,” I answered, holding up the meter like it was an ID card.

“
That’s
what they give you to ride around in?” he said, nodding in the Plymouth’s direction.