“I think we have a mutual acquaintance,” I said.
“Allah?” he said, looking at me lazily. Then he straightened away from the wall and inspected me. “Hey, Stretch, you’re a long one. Groupie for the Globe Trotters?”
“Not quite,” I said. “The Celtics.”
He snapped his fingers. “Got’cha,” he said. “You’re Dunk—right? Nat Baby told me about you. She says you’re a foxy lady. Pleased to meet you, sweet mama.”
“Did you steal the Demaretion?” I asked him.
If he was shocked or insulted, he didn’t reveal it. “Who, what, where?” he said. “Oh, you mean that coin Nat Baby’s papa lost. Nah, I didn’t lift it. It was a
coin.
If I was to decide on a life of crime, coins would have no interest for me whatsoever. I’d go for the green. Worth more and easier to carry. Coins too heavy. You know us coons—we’re lazy, sweet mama.”
“This coin is worth a lot of loot.”
“So?” he said. “You know how many bills you can pack in a little bitty suit satchel? Hey, how come you leaning on me? We just met, didn’t we? Who you—Missy Sherlock Holmes?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I apologize. But I’m getting paid to investigate the robbery. I’m asking everyone.”
“Say no more. But look at me; I’m pure as the driven snow—right?”
His smile was hard to resist. He brought me another vodka, offered me a drag on the cigarette he was smoking—which I declined—and began a fascinating commentary on the people roiling about us.
“Look at them,” he said. “They got to be first of the first. New fads, new fashions, new restaurants, new music. The Trendies, I call them. They can’t stand to be second. Pick it up, try it out, drop it down, go on to something newer. Like pickled kiwi fruit maybe, or steaks grilled over dried cow flops. You dig? They run and run and run. What’s new? What’s the latest? Well, patricide is in. Oh, yeah? Well, then I got to kill my daddy. Next year it’s matricide. There goes Mommy. No verities—that’s their problem.”
“Where did you graduate from?” I demanded.
He stared at me a long moment. “I got an MBA from Wharton,” he said. “You going to hold that against me?”
“No, but why don’t you
use
it?”
“I’d rather steal, sweet mama,” he said, flashing the whitest choppers I’ve ever seen.
He was slender, loose, with a disjointed way of moving—like a marionette with slack strings. He seemed to be two men: flashy Harlem stud and sharp intellectual observer. I didn’t know how seriously to take him. His talk could have been all taunts. Or maybe a mask for his despair. A complex character.
Then Natalie Havistock came rushing up and grabbed his arm—a proprietress.
“Hi, Dunk,” she said. “Glad you could make it. This guy giving you his nigger jive? The Wharton MBA and all that? Bullshit! He’s nothing but a field hand. Load that barge. Tote that bale.”
He showed his teeth again, and cupped one of her heavy breasts. “Nah, honey mine,” he said. “No jive. Dunk here asked me if I pinched your daddy’s coin, and I admitted, yeah I did it. You and me, working together.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Nettie advised. “He’s flying tonight.”
He
was flying?
I
was flying! You could get a rush just by breathing that choky air. My brain was dancing a gavotte—and not just from the pot fumes. I couldn’t decide how much Akbar El Raschid was putting me on. I thought, despite his indolent manner, he had a razor brain. What Nettie called his nigger jive could have been an act, a devious way of concealing his guilt. I just didn’t know.
As Nettie had predicted, by midnight the party was whirling, with new recruits arriving every minute. Someone turned up the volume on the cassette player, and my eardrums began to throb. A few people tried to dance, but most of the guests just stood swaying like zombies, smoking or drinking or both, looking about and grinning vacuously.
I circulated and talked to a few people. One was “into” primal scream, one was “into” Icelandic poetry, and one was “into” high colonics. With luck, I’d never see any of them again.
It really wasn’t my kind of a do. Some of those guests were so
young.
When I was their age, I went to parties where we played Post Office and Spin the Bottle. So I decided to take off. I still hadn’t met the host or hostess, and knew that trying to make a polite farewell in that mob was useless.
I looked around for Natalie and finally spotted her in a corner, pressed up against Akbar El Raschid, gripping him by the lapels of his camouflaged field jacket. It was obvious she was angry about something. I could see she was yelling at him, leaning up to put her face close to his. She appeared furious, but he just looked down at her with his loopy smile.
It took me forever to find a taxi, and I wasn’t overjoyed at roaming those mostly deserted streets at that hour. But I finally took a chance on a rusted gypsy cab and arrived home safely, so thankful that I overtipped the driver and said, “Have a nice day.” At two in the morning!
When I unlocked the door, my phone was ringing, and I dashed for it.
“Hello?” I said breathlessly.
“Dunk?” Al Georgio said. “Jesus, where the hell have you been? I was ready to call out the Marines. After that letter you got…”
“It was sweet of you to be concerned,” I said. “I’m all right, Al. I went down to a party in the East Village to meet Natalie Havistock’s boyfriend.”
“The stud? Have a good time?”
“Not really.”
“Learn anything?”
“First he said he had nothing to do with stealing the Demaretion. Then he said that he and Nettie did it together. I don’t know what to believe.”
“Yeah, the guy’s a flake.”
“When I left, they were having a big fat argument. I don’t know about what. Probably doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Probably not.”
“Al, did you know the Havistocks have commercial cleaners? A man comes in twice a week to vacuum, and once a month a whole crew gives the place a complete going-over.”
“Yes, I knew that.”
“Did you check them out?”
“Of course I checked them out. The second day I was on the case. What do you think—I walk around with my thumb up my—sure, I checked them out. Their alibis stand up.”
“Just asking,” I said humbly.
“That’s okay, Dunk; ask anything you like. Now let me get some sleep.”
“Al, thank you again for checking on me.”
“You’re welcome,” he said gruffly.
I showered and shampooed to get the smoke fumes out of my hair. After I used my dryer, conditioner, and comb, I took a good look in the mirror. Mrs. Havistock had been right; I had to
do
something with it.
I fell into bed, thinking I’d be asleep instantly. But I wasn’t. I kept flopping from side to side. Somehow I was convinced that I had heard something important that day, something significant. But what it was I could not recall. Finally I drifted into troubled slumber. I may have snored—I’ve been told I do that occasionally—but no man was there to give me an elbow in the ribs.
“N
OW YOU MUST CALL
me Vanessa,” she said in the kindliest way imaginable, touching the back of my hand with her bloody talons, “and I shall call you Dunk. Isn’t that your nickname?”
I nodded, doing my best to smile.
She turned slightly and raised one finger. Immediately a waiter was at her shoulder, bending over deferentially—and also copping a peek down her bodice. She had that effect on every man within a fifty-foot radius: heads turned, chairs scraped and, I suppose, testosterone flowed.
“I shall have,” she said precisely, “a very,
very
dry martini, straight up with a single olive. Dunk?”
“A glass of white wine, please.”
“Nonsense,” she said firmly. “No one drinks white wine anymore. And a kir royale,” she said to the waiter. He nodded, grinning like an idiot, and scurried away. “You’ll love it,” she assured me. “Champagne and cassis.” She looked around. “Isn’t this a
fun
place?” she said.
I agreed it was, indeed, a fun place.
What it was, actually, was a fake Tudor pub on Third Avenue near 62nd Street. Beamed ceiling, plastered walls, pseudo-Tiffany lamps, everything burnished wood, gleaming brass, and red velvet. A stage set, with the menu written with chalk on a posted blackboard. Mostly steaks, chops, and things like broiled kidneys and sweetbreads. The prices were horrendous.
We were two of five women in the crowded joint. All the other customers were male, three-piece-suited money types who kept looking up from their mixed grills to take another long stare at Vanessa Havistock. When two men were lunching together, I figured one of them had to say, “We’ll flip for them, Charlie. Loser gets the beanpole.”
That morning phone call had been a surprise. I thought Vanessa was just being polite when she had asked, “Can we have lunch?” But no, there she was with an invitation to join her at the “fun place” on Third Avenue. I accepted promptly. I wore an old droopy shirtwaist, knowing there was no way I was ever going to outdress
her.
It took me awhile to understand why she had selected that pub. Then I realized it was practically a men’s locker room, with hearty guffaws, slapped backs, and vile cigars. Our Vanessa wanted to be where the boys were. That was okay; every grown woman should have a hobby, and she just
reveled
in the attention she attracted.
She ordered for both of us—naturally; she wouldn’t trust me to know what I wanted. So we had cold sliced beefsteak, very rare, with a salad of arugula and watercress.
“Lots of protein,” she said, patting my hand. What a
physical
woman she was. “Very good in the sex department. By the way,” she added, “how
is
your sex department?”
“Fabulous,” I said boldly.
“Glad to hear it,” she said, knowing I was lying in my teeth.
The kir royale was super, and so were those slices of cold beef, so rare that I wondered if they had even warmed the cow. But Vanessa soon made it clear that this wasn’t to be a purely social occasion.
“Tell me,” she said casually, drizzling some olive oil over her salad, “how is your investigation coming along?”
“All right. I’ve talked to a lot of people.”
“Oh?” she said, knifing her steak into smaller slabs. “Who?”
“Just about everyone. You and your husband, of course. Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Havistock. Roberta and Ross Minchen. Orson Vanwinkle. Natalie and her boyfriend.”
“Oh, my,” she said, “you have been getting around.”
I was fascinated by the way she ate. Those sharp white teeth tore into meat, greens, and a crusty baguette with ferocious joy. Something primitive in the way she consumed food, and I thought my initial reaction had been on target: she really had a lot of animality.
“About Ross Minchen…” she said, busy with her lunch and not looking at me. “Don’t you think he’s…well, a wee bit
odd
?”
“Odd?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Oh…” she said vaguely, “sometimes he does strange things.”
I could have sworn right then that she knew about the Minchens’ videocassettes, but I never mentioned them. “What kind of strange things, Vanessa?”
“Well…for one thing, he likes to compose pornographic haiku—those three-line Japanese poems.”
“Ross Minchen can write Japanese?”
“Oh, no,” she said, laughing merrily. “He writes them in English. Some of them are quite amusing. Like dirty limericks, you know—but different.”
Weirder and weirder.
She ordered espresso for us and consulted the posted blackboard for desserts available. We agreed that everything offered sounded sinfully fattening, so we skipped. She took a pack of Kent III from her bag and held it out to me.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
“Smart you,” she said. “I’m hooked.” She extracted a cigarette, and instantly that infatuated waiter was at her side, snapping a lighter.
“Thank you,” she said.
“My pleasure, madam,” he murmured, and moved regretfully away.
“Isn’t he sweet?” she said, in the tones she might have used to comment, “What a nice fox terrier.” Then, smoking and sipping her coffee, she asked me my personal reactions to everyone in the Havistock family.
“I’m always curious to know what people think, meeting us for the first time,” she said, an expert at the Wry Pout.
I knew she was pumping me, ever so tenderly, to learn what I knew about the theft of the Demaretion. I should have told her that what I had learned could have been engraved on the head of a pin.
I told her only what I was certain she already knew. I was determinedly discreet, and she listened without displaying any reaction until we got onto the subject of Orson Vanwinkle. Then her dark eyes glittered, she raised a hand to brush one of those wings of raven hair away from her face, and her expression became absolutely feral.
“Orson Vanwinkle is a vile, vile man,” she said, very intensely. “And if I were you, I’d have nothing to do with him.”
“I do have to question him,” I said mildly.
“I suppose so, but never,
ever
trust him. He’s alienated everyone he’s known. Went through a dozen jobs before Archibald took pity on him and hired him as a secretary. What a mistake that was! The man’s a creep. Ugh!” she added, shaking her shoulders with disgust.
She signaled for the bill, and when it arrived, she took a credit card from her brocaded handbag. “Isn’t plastic wonderful!” she said, and I agreed it was wonderful. I thanked her for a delightful lunch, and she said we must do it again soon.
On our way out, the headwaiter, who apparently was an old friend, greeted her effusively. He thanked her for her patronage, and said he hoped to see her again soon. Then he kissed her fingers. I could swear he passed a small, folded piece of paper into her palm, but on the sidewalk, she fumbled in her purse to make certain she had her credit card, the little paper disappeared, and I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing.
“Got to leave you here, Dunk,” she said. “My dentist is waiting. Nothing serious—just cleaning and a checkup, but I’ve put it off long enough.”
“Thank you again for the lunch, Vanessa. I enjoyed it.”
“We
did
have a good time, didn’t we?” she said, and leaned up to kiss my cheek. “Ta-ta,” she said.