The Chelsea Girl Murders (4 page)

“Fling,” he said.

“A friend.” As casually as possible, I added, “Did he leave a message?”

“Yeah, either he's going to his lib to work on an ex-parent, or he's off to the lab for his experiment. I'm not really sure. He's gone for a month. He'd try to E-mail when he had time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Lab? What's this guy do?”

“He's a physicist.”

“You're blushing again.”

“I'm tired and flushed,” I said. “Jesus.”

“Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with it. But why the secrecy? Is he married? Please tell me he isn't married …”

“No, of course not. We're just friends. No big deal. He's a friend of Tamayo's, actually. She told me to look him up while I was there and I did.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“Nothing's wrong with him.”

“Oh. I get it. It's unrequited. Your feelings aren't being returned the way you want,” he said.

“I don't know.” Louis had almost worn me down. I almost said, Look, this is the deal, Louis. Pierre and I live on two different continents, he reads English but doesn't speak it very well, and I have your basic bad-tourist French, which is amusing—for about a week. He's a French genius with excellent table manners, from a proud Gallic family descended from minor nobility, and I'm a crude American chick. These things only work out in Fran Drescher movies.

But though Louis is a good friend and an honorable colleague, he also runs the Jackson Broadcasting Rumor File, Radio Free Babylon, so I kept it to myself.

“He's just a friend,” I said.

“If you say so,” Louis said. “But whatever he is, he's made you soft. Jerry's going to run roughshod over you in absentia while you're on vacation. He thinks this is a trick, and he's going to try a preemptive strike.…”

“What can he do?”

“Don't underestimate him. He's up to something. I'm just not sure what yet,” he said. “I'll keep my ears to the pipes and keep you posted. You might try disarming him with a few bitchy comments, just to reassure him.”

Before Louis left, he filled me in on the many other plots swirling about the office. The politics of a medieval court had nothing on those of WWN, or as Louis called it, The Holy Woman Empire. It took every bit of self-control to resist being drawn into the various intrigues.

Being back in the office had been a challenge though. Every time I turned around, it seemed some plotting courtier was darting out of the shadows with a dram of poison about someone else. The executive producers were plotting against each other. The associate producers were plotting against each other. Even the interns were plotting against each other. Most of this plotting took place beneath a pleasant, pastel civility. This was the corporate culture Solange and Jerry had created. Before the day was through and I was freed, I'd have to dodge both the Evil Queen and her Cowardly Knave.

About an hour before quitting time, Jerry tried to provoke me by telling me we needed a younger, prettier cohost on our after-school program, a grab bag of dating issues, school, and adventures. He added that its focus should shift completely to makeup, fashion, and how to get a boyfriend. I promised to think about it.

I've never seen that guy look so miserable. If I'd known being mature and circumspect had this effect on him, I would have tried it long ago. What I told Louis Levin notwithstanding, I was doing this to Jerry on purpose. It hadn't started out that way. It started because I came back, jet-lagged from the road, too exhausted to fight, and forced to rely on the little bit of diplomacy I learned in my travels. But when I noticed how much it bugged Jerry when I didn't tongue-lash him, I started being mature and diplomatic just to, well, make his monkey crazy. It reminded me of one of my favorite old jokes: A masochist and a sadist are sitting on a bench. The masochist says, “Hurt me.” The sadist says, “No.”

Evidently, my new maturity was getting to Solange too. A half hour or so later, just as I was about to leave, Solange came into my office and said, “Get a lot of rest on your vacation. You look tired. I'm very concerned about you.”

“Thanks.”

“Relax. Don't worry about anything. I'll make sure Jerry doesn't make trouble for you,” she said. “I'll make sure Paula and Lucille don't make trouble either. You just get lots of rest.”

The last two were executive producers. We'd all gotten along okay in the brief times I was in the office, and it had never occurred to me that Paula and Lucille would want to make trouble for me—until now. I figured Solange was trying to pit me against them, and she was probably trying to pit them against me in a similar fashion. It was a favorite blood sport of hers, provoking people to attack each other, then stepping in after the bloodletting as the kindly voice of reason who would restore order.

I was tempted to use my favorite passive-aggressive weapon against her, telling her about someone she disliked who was now happy. That always burned her butt. But as with Jerry, it was even more vexing to her if I just took the high road and acted mature and kind of … what's the word … classy. Who knew? She hated people who took the high road over her even more than she hated people who were happy, which almost made taking the high road worth it. In any event, it was a good thing I was going on vacation, because torturing them was fun but that high-road thing is really hard to keep up for any extended period of time.

Finally, it was quitting time. At the end of the day, when I left the pink-and-black granite Jackson Broadcasting Building, I felt a great relief and freedom, as the giant fingers that had been squeezing my chest for the past five days peeled back and let me go. No intrigues, no gossip, no gender politics for two whole weeks. Just rest and relaxation. Heaven.

chapter three

When I got back to the Chelsea, loaded down with cat food, new clothes, and other essentials, I called Nadia from the lobby as she had requested.

“Who is it?” Nadia snapped.

“It's Robin, Tamayo's friend. I'm downstairs. Is it okay if I come up?”

“Give me half an hour.” She slammed down the phone.

By now, I was really dragging my can. A half hour seemed an eternity—yet, ironically, not long enough to go somewhere and do something worthwhile.

I took a seat in the lobby. There were just three people sitting in the lobby—an old man who slept in an armchair, a hip-looking young man with a brush cut and black-rimmed glasses slouched in a chair, and me. The lobby was eclectically decorated, to say the least, with artwork of different, sometimes conflicting schools covering every available space. The walls were full of paintings, and there was sculpture scattered around the seating area. A papier-mâché woman in a swing hung from the middle of the ceiling. The black-iron fireplace was guarded by two snarling black griffins. Above the mantel was a carved wood tableaux depicting different artists at work. On the mantel were two strange silver filigree vases that looked like ancient Phoenician cremation urns, flanking a bust of Harry S. Truman. Behind the lobby desk, where the mail was held in hundreds of tiny cubbyholes, there was more art—on the walls, even the ceiling. Some of the art was very good, by famous and nonfamous artists, some was very bad. The mix seemed democratic and nonjudgmental, like the hotel itself. It was otherworldly, yet warm and welcoming at the same time.

It was easy to imagine you were in another time because the lobby had only barely been modernized over the years, and the mix of furniture and styles gave it a timeless quality. I imagined the place around the turn of the century, when Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt took tea in this marble-walled lobby. In the 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, brooded over his creation here, and Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. In the 1960s, Janis Joplin gave Leonard Cohen a blow job on an unmade bed upstairs “while limousines [waited] in the street,” inspiring him to write a song about it, and the delicate and doomed Edie Sedgwick, Warhol Superstar and Youthquaker, kept setting her room on fire. There is a famous picture of her sitting in the lobby with kohled eyes and bandaged hands, waiting for the management to find her a new room. Some of this I knew through Tamayo, and some just as a New Yorker who had long admired and been curious about the Chelsea.

While I was daydreaming about a young Edith Piaf taking refuge here with composer Virgil Thomson, a man with dyed apple-red hair came in with a black-and-white dog, who yapped at me and wrenched me back into the present. They were followed by a man with a horrible black toupee, who stopped just inside the glass doors and looked around.

After him came an elderly lady, elegantly dressed, accompanied by a solicitous young man who addressed her as Mrs. Grundy.

“I've been experimenting with new textures and surfaces, Mrs. Grundy,” said the young man. “A fine-weave bleached denim instead of canvas, also a shaved velour stretched over a frame, if I could have a half hour to show you, Mrs. Grundy …”

“I have to run now for a meeting. But call my assistant, Ben, and make an appointment to show me your portfolio,” she said. “And please, call me Miriam.”

It was Miriam Grundy, the widow of the late, great poet Oliver Grundy, a well-known patron of the arts and a genuine Chelsea legend. Miriam Grundy—that explained why, though a tiny lady, she had such a big presence. Miriam Grundy was larger than life, the darling of the avant garde as well as the Old Guard. The details of her life had grown mythic. When she was in her twenties, her family fled Europe and the Nazis for America, where young Miriam met Oliver Grundy, a poet, scion of a wealthy WASP family, and a married man. Their affair had caused a terrible scandal, and details of the divorce appeared in the penny papers along with some of the steamy love letters Miriam and Oliver exchanged, the filthy parts replaced with dashes. After she and Oliver married, they abandoned high society and ran around with beats, surrealists, and other bohemian artist types. High society welcomed them back in the 1960s.

Now, this rich widow's name showed up, boldface, in the gossip columns all the time, attending everything from high society Museum of Modern Art benefits to downtown performance art shows at avant joints like P.S. 22 and Here. What a life she had had. She'd escaped certain death in Europe, had a grand love story, had become a benefactor of the arts, and was now widely imitated by drag queens.

So distracted was I by Miriam Grundy, I almost missed the young man who came in behind her. When I did notice him, I had to look twice before I realized it was the manboy from the night before, walking determinedly to the elevator, which whisked him away before I could get my bearings.

I called Nadia from the house phone in the lobby.

“What?” she snapped.

“I just saw him, your fiancé!” I said. “He's on his way up. You can stop worrying.”

“Oh, thank God,” she said.

“You need some time alone with him now?” I asked.

“No, no, we have to go meet someone,” she said.

“Then may I come up?”

“In about five or ten minutes,” she said, hanging up without saying good-bye.

I gave her fifteen minutes before I hoisted my sorry carcass up and dragged it to the elevator. Just as the elevator doors were about to close, a man stuck his hand in, a very handsome man, fortyish, with a passing resemblance to Gregory Peck. At first, he didn't seem to notice there was anyone else in the elevator, but around the third floor he smiled, and looked at me in a very seductive way, with a combination of Christlike empathy and manly desire. I got a buzz off the eye contact, I admit.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“You look familiar. Do you live here?”

“No. I'm staying at a friend's place.”

“I'm Gerald,” he said.

“Robin. Do you live here?”

“Not anymore, but I used to. How long will you be here?”

“I don't know. You see, my apartment burned down—”

I didn't get a chance to finish. The doors opened at seven to another woman, around my age, with masses of frizzy brown hair. As soon as she saw Gerald, she started screaming.

“You thieving bastard! Where have you been? I hope you brought my money,” she yelled, her accent either Scottish or Irish.

“Maggie, I was delayed. I have to meet someone …” Gerald said.

“Who?”

“It's confidential. I'll be back with the money later tonight or tomorrow.”

“I'll be out tonight.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“You'd better not be lying, you bastard!” she shouted. “Or I'll feed you to the dogs.”

Mercifully, I was able to push past them and escape the fray. Gerald tried to escape too, but the woman with the frizzy brown hair got on the elevator and wouldn't let him out. The doors to the elevator closed, shutting out their argument behind me.

The seventh floor was pretty lively. The man in the horrible toupee was in the hallway, talking to a bald, tattooed bodybuilder who was standing in his doorway, lifting hand weights. The bodybuilder didn't even seem to see the guy in the bad toupee, and just stared, stone-faced, past him. Down the hall, a door next to Tamayo's opened and a pile of men's clothes flew into the hallway, followed by a short, compact man with a leonine mane of white hair, wearing boxers and an undershirt. The door slammed shut. The man began to put on his trousers, and had them half on when the door opened again and a blond woman in a dressing gown came out and threw a pair of shoes at him, one after the other. The poor guy tried to duck the shoes while pulling on his trousers, and fell over. From the floor, he said something in Spanish to the woman that sounded very sweet and apologetic to me, but it didn't move the blowsy blond woman. She swore in Spanish, went back inside, and slammed the door again.

What a nuthouse, I thought. There was a reason residents referred to this place as “The Mothership.” Not that I was judging, mind you. The whole world is nuts.