SoHo Sins (4 page)

I made my way to the light panel.

“Are you sure, Hogan?” I said. “I thought maybe the idea was for me to go share details over canapés at the Whitney Museum. Or maybe leak your pet theories to the
Post
, so you could blow the case and lose McGuinn his job. Sort of an early retirement plan.”

“You’re a laugh riot, buddy. Just set me up with some meetings—one with Philip at his office, one with Claudia Silva.”

“Since when do you need me for that? Just call them up.”

“Yeah, like I know crap about these art types and their little world. I need to talk to Philip’s contacts in their own surroundings, get an idea of the context. It helps to have a buffer, somebody they trust to put them a little more at ease. People tend to get uncomfortable talking to a detective.”

“Really? I can’t imagine why.”

“Just set it up.”

I doused the lights and we rode down without saying any more. On the sidewalk, we stood shuffling for a moment.

“Got time for a drink?” I asked.

“Not tonight. I’m bushed, and Dorothy expects me home. It’s Salisbury steak night.”

I nodded and we started south down West Broadway, past a knot of people gathered in front of the four bulky black doormen at Tessa’s. In the distance, the Trade Towers imprinted themselves massively on the night. The galleries around us were dark and only a few lights remained in the boutique windows, shining on long phantasmal dresses and overpriced shoes. At Grand Street, all the Eurotrash places were full. The cafe tables spilled out onto the sidewalk and flickered with candles and cigarettes. Everyone was talking over the live music at Novecento.

I stopped, and Hogan asked me if I was all right.

“Sure, OK,” I said. “Just kind of pissed.”

“Murder will do that to you.”

“You’re used to it. I’m still an amateur.”

He nodded, his face set. “Somebody killed a lady you liked. What are you going to do—blame the cosmos? Don’t be a putz.”

“It’s hard to know what to think,” I said. My voice had a hollowness I had not heard there before. “Little things throw me. You know, like using the past tense with Mandy’s name. Like the silence inside the apartment.”

I didn’t tell him the rest. Living in the art world, I had many acquaintances but very few friends—almost none who mattered once a check was written or the latest show came down. Now, at midlife, I was starting to lose my best companions to craziness, deception, and death. It felt like a mean prank. My complaint, however futile, came out in stark terms.

“I don’t much care to find dead friends in my buildings,” I said.

“Terrific,” Hogan responded. “So go to work. It’s your only chance to feel halfway right again.”

“I don’t know. Revenge might help.”

“Don’t waste my time.” Hogan shifted his weight from one foot to the other, impatient to be on his way. “Believe me, Jack, spite never solved a case. It just warps your thinking.”

“All right,” I said. “I haven’t got any better idea.”

With that, we said a quick so long and Hogan headed down the block to Canal Street, where the porno shops mixed into the outskirts of Chinatown and the traffic thickened in and out of the Holland Tunnel. I watched him cross over into the small cobbled park on the north edge of Tribeca, passing under the wet trees toward his dumpy office in Lower Manhattan.

When I tried to sleep that night, the picture of a crazed Angela Oliver came into my head, and I had to lie for a long time without stirring, for fear of coming fully awake. I clung to the sight of a small distraught woman in a sleeveless white blouse, standing on a porch with a pistol in her hand. Her brown hair was pulled back from her face with two silver clips.

Despite all its defects, you see, my mind works best in the dark. It is there, in silence, that I have tried many times to understand my past life with Nathalie. How could a thing so simple—the infatuation of a visiting American graduate student with his French classmate at the Sorbonne—turn so mercurial and wrenching in the course of a marriage?

Our plan seemed reasonable enough: a courtship among the cafés of the boulevard Saint Michel, followed by a transatlantic life as Nathalie pursued her assignments for
Libération
and I attended to my buildings and art gallery in SoHo. How did it lead to the howling nights, the mutual threats, the sex that was more like vengeance than love?

Angela would understand, the Angela who trembled and threatened. I pictured her standoff with a rival as Philip had described it more than once—his slender first wife, with a revolver held level, cursing out the “other woman,” one of many, in front of a tract house in Bronxville. Yes, Angela got it.

Nathalie and I were supposed to be too smart for jealousy, but in fact nobody is. Not for long, anyhow. Not all my wife’s fey Left Bank entourage and not all of SoHo put together. Not Mandy or Claudia—not Philip himself, for that matter. Not even Hogan. That’s why I didn’t for a moment think of Angela as a killer. I thought of her as a woman driven to an act of high drama—a bit of British theater on an American front porch in the suburbs.

I had first heard about the incident a couple years earlier, the night I met up with my Icelandic sculptor friend, the Viking, at an opening at Rush Gallery on Fourteenth Street. The beefy Scandinavian, who makes his work with steel beams and dynamite, wasn’t too impressed with the show’s photographs of skateboarders in the concrete apartment blocks of Frankfurt.

Needing a change, we headed over to the Stockyard. The short walk led past a few shuttered meat-loading stalls, some of them still active during the day, and onward to a desolate corner near a barbeque shed. A red glow of neon led us like a beacon through the fog. When we arrived at the bar, we saw half a dozen Harleys leaning under the bare lights of the old metal canopy. A black stretch limo waited at the curb. It was that kind of mixed-up place, one where the Viking would feel at home. He was constantly on the road, jetting from one country to another, setting off explosions in various landscapes and picking up girls here and there. His hair was blond and bright; his arms erupted thick and bare from a black canvas vest.

We entered to a blast of heat carrying Charlie Daniels music from the jukebox and made our way through the crowd of bikers in leather and lawyers in Polo shirts and art world slackers wearing Goodwill castoffs from the ’70s. The Viking bulldozed our way to the far end of the bar, near the pool table in back.

The barmaids, both in straw cowboy hats, wore halter tops and low-slung jeans. When the Viking ordered beers, one of them immediately upped the ante on him.

“A honcho like you should drink like a man,” she said. “What are you guys, wimps?”

“No,” the Viking said, without inflection—the way you state a plain fact.

She laughed, smacked four shot glasses down on the bar, and grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey. “You up for it?”

“Surely. If the sweet American ladies will join us.”

The other barmaid came over and glanced the Viking up and down. “Too bad the rodeo left town,” she said. “They need a few more bulls to wrestle.”

Before the sculptor could answer, the girls clinked glasses with us and slammed back the Wild Turkey in unison.

“Shit,” the first one said, “I hope you ain’t this goddamn slow when you lick pussy.”

The Viking and I quickly downed the whiskey, and the first barmaid slid two Budweisers toward us. “Thirty-six dollars.”

“I have it,” a voice said quickly behind us.

One of the cowgirls actually allowed herself a fast smile. “Well, if it isn’t Prince Charming, dressed for the ball.”

I turned to find Philip standing three feet away in a tuxedo. Behind him was Claudia, oozing halfway out of a low-cut sheath. She had stopped to talk to a biker with a gray beard pulled into two points over the crest of his belly.

“We were just at some excruciating reception at the UN,” Philip explained. “Hell on earth.”

“And well deserved,” I said. “So what brings you here?”

“Claudia’s friends in Williamsburg told her about it. She thought it would be amusing.” Half-turning, he called back to her, “What would you like, sweetheart?”

“White wine. G
razie, carino
.”

Before I could warn him, Philip called his order to the barmaid over the din.

“What?” she asked, making him shout even louder.

“Two white wines, please. Do you have a decent chablis?”

At that precise moment, the cowgirl reached under the bar and turned down the jukebox. Philip’s words suddenly sang out, bringing jeers of laughter from every corner of the room. The second barmaid snatched a red-and-white bullhorn from beside the cash register.

“Did you hear that?” she scoffed to the crowd. “Sir Prissy over here thinks he’s in the goddamned Sonoma Valley. Don’t worry, hoss, she looks like she can swallow more than chablis.”

More laughter, and a foul name or two.

“Who wants a beer?” the barmaid shouted.

The music came swelling back up, but not before I heard Claudia’s biker friend start to hassle the barmaid.

“Hey, you scag,” he said, “that’s no way to talk about a real lady.” He stepped toward the bar.

Philip, who probably couldn’t guess how close we were to disaster, nevertheless showed the right instincts. “No harm done,” he said, heading off the biker with a smile. “My mistake, really. Let’s all have something more respectable. Whiskey, is it?”

Philip turned and flagged down the first barmaid. “All right then, beer and whiskey all around for my friends here. For everyone.”

That got him a cheer.

The girls lined shots and bottles from one end of the bar to the other. The crowd came up in waves, downing the booze and laughing. Meanwhile, touching her bare arm, the biker resumed talking intently to Claudia. His voice was low as he hovered protectively, his eyes darting repeatedly to her luscious half-exposed bust. Claudia, in contrast, seemed oblivious to the whole situation. She was rather accustomed to causing a stir in public places just by arriving.

“All in good fun,” Philip said. He handed more brimming shot glasses around. “Cheers, one and all.”

The good times escalated when the barmaids ordered all drinks off the counter. Someone cranked up the jukebox with a fast Dwight Yoakam number, and the two girls climbed up on the bar.

They whooped, the crowd whooped back, and the girl on the right poured a cold beer over her shoulders and halter top. Sweat trickling on their bare bellies, the cowgirls began a lurid, clogging stomp up and down the bar, making the wood bend and the bikers holler.

“I can’t hear you,” the taller one said through her bullhorn. “What? Not goddamn hot enough for you?”

“No,” yelled our bearded outlaw biker. He had an arm around Claudia.

“All right, then, you hog jockeys. Step back.” The girl handed her drenched friend the bullhorn and took a swig from an unmarked green bottle. Pulling a cigarette lighter from her jeans pocket, she flicked it in front of her mouth and blew a stream of flame halfway along the length of the bar.

“Hot damn,” her accomplice shouted into the bullhorn. “Ladies, don’t leave us up here alone.”

The two started pointing at women in the crowd—“you, you, up here.”

They reached out to haul the candidates—some reluctant, some quite eager—up onto the creaking bar.

“If you’re bitchin’, you dance. If you’re chicken, you sing. Two choices. Otherwise, haul your ass outside. Come on, you sluts, don’t be shy.”

The barmaid’s persuasion, if that’s the right term, proved unnecessary. Dancers were already lining up on the bar—a Jersey girl with volcanic hair, a woman in her twenties who could have been a corporate secretary or maybe a junior PR flack, another whose tan slacks and demeanor signaled department store clerk, and even a female attorney I knew. All that was missing was an art babe, and then suddenly Claudia was being hoisted past me with a heaving assist from the biker. She popped up and turned with a smile and blew Philip a kiss.

“Well, this is novel,” he said to no one in particular.

Claudia was the only girl in a dress, a garment the bikers seemed to appreciate—loudly. It wasn’t hard to see why.

The next song kicked in, a live Farm Aid recording of Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River.” The room sang along with each chorus as the girls shook and flaunted their stuff. The Viking, keeping time with his beer bottle, wailed away with the rest.

Philip nodded his head and did his best to get into the spirit.

“You know, it’s bizarre,” he shouted into my ear. “I mean, look at Claudia up there. Don’t you think she’s superb?”

“You don’t want to know what I think right now, Phil.”

“Yes, well, there you have it. Claudia’s enough to drive any man crazy. I couldn’t be happier.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“Oh, I am. Truly blessed.” He took an elegant pull from his beer bottle. “But do you know, the oddest thing happened tonight. After the UN, we stopped first at some fashion shop just over there across from the meat stalls.”

“Jeffrey.”

“That’s it. And while Claudia was in the changing room trying on skirts, I found myself flirting with the sales clerk. A girl from Mumbai, not even particularly pretty. Dark and done up with rings and piercings, you know. Exotic, if you go for that look. Nothing like my Claudia. It was the damnedest thing, though. I couldn’t stay away from her. Even took her phone number. How peculiar is that?”

“Pretty normal, I’d say.”

“Is it? Something similar happened when Angela was in the hospital giving birth to Melissa. I ended up having an affair with her OB/GYN nurse. I mean, what the hell, Jack?”

“Forget it. You’re all right,” I shouted back over the clamor. “Just like the rest of us, only a little meaner.”

“Am I?”

“You’re rich. You can afford to be.”

Philip nodded, not hearing or understanding really, just trying to look as though he enjoyed the music. “Sometimes I wonder what ever became of that poor nurse,” he said.

“Why?”

“Angela found her name in my address book.”

“How’d she react?”

“Went to the girl’s place and gave her quite a scare. I’m sorry I can’t remember the young lady’s name.”