“No relationship survives total transparency.” Suzze lifted her face off his chest. Myron saw the tears on her cheeks, felt the wetness on his shirt. “We all keep secrets, Myron. You know that as well as anyone.”
By the time Myron made it back to the Dakota, it was three in the morning. He checked to see whether Kitty had replied to his “Please forgive me” message. She hadn’t. On the off chance that Lex had told him the truth—and that Kitty had told Lex the truth—he sent Esperanza an e-mail to see if they could check passenger manifests for Kitty’s name on flights out of Newark or JFK heading to South America. He signed on to the computer to see if Terese was around. She wasn’t.
He thought about Terese. He thought about Jessica Culver, the ex-love Lex had mentioned. After claiming for years that marriage was not for her—the years she was with Myron—Jessica had recently wed a man named Stone Norman. Stone, for crying out loud. What kind of name was that? His friends probably called him “The Stoner” or “Stone Man.” Thinking about old lovers, especially ones you wanted to marry, was never a productive endeavor, so Myron made himself stop.
Half an hour later, Win came home. He was accompanied by his latest girlfriend, a tall modelesque Asian named Mee. There was a third person too, another attractive Asian woman Myron had never seen before.
Myron looked over at Win. Win wiggled his eyebrows.
Mee said, “Hi, Myron.”
“Hi, Mee.”
“This is my friend, Yu.”
Myron held back the sigh and said hello. Yu nodded. When the two women left the room, Win grinned at Myron. Myron just shook his head. “Yu?”
“Yep.”
When Win had first started up with Mee, he loved to share jokes using her name.
“Mee so horny . . . It’s Mee time . . . Sometimes I just want to make love to Mee.”
“Yu and Mee?” Myron said.
Win nodded. “Wonderful, don’t you think?”
“No. Where have you been all night?”
Win leaned in conspiratorially. “Between Yu and Mee . . .”
“Yes?”
Win just smiled.
“Oh.” Myron sighed. “I get it. Good one.”
“Be happy. It used to be all about Mee. But then I realized something. It’s about Yu too.”
“Or, uh, in this case, Yu and Mee together.”
“Now you’re in the spirit,” Win said. “How was your sojourn to Adiona Island?”
“You want to hear this now?”
“Yu and Mee can wait.”
“By that, you mean the girls, not us, right?”
“It does get confusing, doesn’t it?”
“Not to mention perverse.”
“Don’t worry. When I’m not around, Yu can keep Mee occupied.” Win sat, steepled his fingers. “Tell me what you learned.”
Myron did. When he finished, Win said, “Methinks Lex doth protest too much.”
“You got that too?”
“When a man does that much philosophizing, he’s covering.”
“Plus that last line about her going back to Chile or Peru in the morning?”
“Throwing you off the track. He wants you to stay away from Kitty.”
“Do you think he knows where she is?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Myron thought about what Suzze said, about transparency and everyone having secrets. “Oh, one more thing.” Myron fumbled for his BlackBerry. “Gabriel Wire had a guard working the gate. He looked familiar to me, but I can’t place him.”
He handed Win the BlackBerry, the photograph on the home screen. Win studied it for a moment.
“This,” Win said, “is also not good.”
“You recognize him?”
“I haven’t heard his name in years.” Win handed the BlackBerry back. “But it looks like Evan Crisp. Big-time pro. One of the best.”
“Who’d he work for?”
“Crisp was always freelance. The Ache brothers used to bring him in when there was serious trouble.”
The Ache brothers, Herman and Frank, had been two leading Old-World mobsters. RICO had finally moved in and closed them down. Like many of his elder brethren, Frank Ache was serving time in a maximum security federal penitentiary, mostly forgotten. Herman, who had to be seventy by now, had managed to slither out of his indictment and used his ill-gotten booty to feign legitimacy.
“A hit man?”
“To some degree,” Win said. “Crisp was brought in when your muscle needed a little finesse. If you wanted someone to make a lot of noise or shoot up a place, Crisp wasn’t your man. If you wanted someone to die or vanish without raising suspicion, you called Crisp.”
“And now Crisp works as a rent-a-cop for Gabriel Wire?”
“That would be a no,” Win said. “It’s a small island. Crisp got tipped off the moment you arrived and then awaited your imminent arrival. My theory is, he knew you’d take the photograph and that we would figure out his identity.”
“To scare us away,” Myron said.
“Yes.”
“Except we don’t scare easily.”
“Yes,” Win said with only a small eye roll. “We are so very macho.”
“Okay, so first we have this weird post on Suzze’s board, probably put there by Kitty. Then we have Lex meeting up with Kitty. We have Crisp working for Wire. Plus Lex hiding out at Gabriel Wire’s place and probably lying to us.”
“And when you add those together, what do you come up with?”
“Bubkes,” Myron said.
“No wonder you’re our leader.” Win rose, poured himself a cognac, tossed Myron a Yoo-hoo. Myron did not shake or open it. He just held the cold can in his hand. “Of course, just because Lex may be lying, that doesn’t mean his basic message to you is wrong.”
“What message is that?”
“You interfere with the best intentions. But you interfere nonetheless. Whatever your brother and Kitty are going through, perhaps it isn’t your place. You haven’t been part of their lives for a very long time.”
Myron thought about that. “That may be my fault.”
“Oh, please,” Win said.
“What?”
“Your fault. So when Kitty, for example, told Brad that you hit on her, was she telling the truth?”
“No.”
Win spread his hands. “So?”
“So maybe she was just striking back. I said some horrible things about her. I accused her of trapping Brad, manipulating him. I didn’t believe the baby was his. Maybe she was using the lie to defend herself.”
“Boo”—Win started playing air violin—“hoo.”
“I’m not defending what she did. But maybe I messed up too.”
“And, pray tell, how would you have messed up?”
Myron said nothing.
“Go ahead,” Win said. “I’m waiting.”
“You want me to say, ‘by interfering.’ ”
“Bingo.”
“So perhaps this is my chance to make amends.”
Win shook his head.
“What?”
“How did you mess up in the first place? By interfering. How do you intend to make up for it? By interfering.”
“So I should just forget what I saw on that surveillance camera?”
“I would.” Win took a deep long sip. “But, alas, I know you can’t.”
“So what do we do?”
“What we always do. At least in the morning. Tonight I have plans.”
“And those would again be between Yu and Mee?”
“I would say bingo again, but I so hate repeating myself.”
“You know,” Myron said, choosing his words carefully, “and I don’t mean to moralize here or judge.”
Win crossed his legs. When he did it, the crease remained perfect. “Oh, this is going to be rich.”
“And I recognize that Mee has been a part of your life for longer than any woman I remember, and I’m glad that you seem to have at least curtailed your appetite for hookers.”
“I prefer the term ‘upscale escorts.’ ”
“Super. In the past, your womanizing, your being a cad . . .”
“A
rakish
cad,” Win said with a rakish smile. “I always liked the word ‘rakish,’ don’t you?”
“It fits,” Myron said.
“But?”
“When we were in our twenties and even thirties, it was all somewhat, I don’t know, endearing.”
Win waited.
Myron stared at the can of Yoo-hoo. “Forget it.”
“And now,” Win said, “you think my behavior, for a man of my years, is somewhat closer to pathetic.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You think I should settle down a bit.”
“I just want you to be happy, Win.”
Win spread his hands. “So do I.”
Myron gave him the flat eyes. “You’re referring to the Yu in the other room again, aren’t you?”
The rakish grin. “Love me for all my faults.”
“Again, by me, do you mean, uh, Mee?”
Win stood. “Don’t worry, old friend. I am happy.” Win started moving toward the bedroom door. He stopped suddenly, closed his eyes, looked troubled. “But you may have a point.”
“That being?”
“Maybe I’m not happy,” he said, a wistful distant look on his face. “Maybe you’re not either.”
Myron waited, almost sighed. “Go ahead. Say it.”
“So perhaps it’s time to make Yu and Mee happy.”
He vanished into the other room. Myron stared at the Yoo-hoo can for a little while. There was no noise. Win had mercifully soundproofed his room years ago.
At seventy thirty A.M., a mussed Mee came out in a robe and started making breakfast. She asked Myron if he wanted something. Myron politely declined.
At eight A.M., his phone rang. He checked the number and saw it was from Big Cyndi.
“Good morning, Mr. Bolitar.”
“Good morning, Big Cyndi.”
“Your ponytailed drug dealer was at the club last night. And I tailed him.”
Myron frowned. “In the Batgirl costume?”
“It’s dark. I blend.”
That image came and thankfully fled.
“Did I tell you that Yvonne Craig herself helped me make it?”
“You know Yvonne Craig?”
“Oh, we’re old friends. You see, she told me that the material was one-way stretch. It’s sort of like a girdle fabric, not as thin as Lycra, but not as thick as neoprene. It was very hard to find.”
“I’m sure.”
“Did you know Yvonne starred as the superhot green chick on
Star Trek
?”
“Marta, the Orion slave girl,” Myron said, because he couldn’t help himself. He tried to get them back on track. “So where is our drug dealer now?”
“Teaching French at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey.”
12
T
he cemetery overlooked the schoolyard.
Who came up with that—placing a school full of kids, just budding into adolescence, directly across the street from a resting place for the dead? These children walk by this cemetery or look out on it literally every day. Did it bother them? Did it remind them of their own mortality, that in what would amount to infinity’s breath, they’d grow old and end up there too? Or, more likely, was the cemetery an abstract, something that had nothing to do with them, something so commonplace to them that they barely saw it anymore?
School, cemetery. Talk about life’s bookends.
Big Cyndi, still in the Batgirl costume, knelt by a gravestone, head lowered, shoulders hunched, so that from a distance, one might mistake her for a Volkswagen Beetle. When Myron approached, she looked out of the corner of her eye and whispered, “I’m blending,” and then started sobbing again.
“So where exactly is Ponytail?”
“Inside the school, room two-oh-seven.”
Myron looked toward the school. “A drug-dealing middle school French teacher?”
“It seems that way, Mr. Bolitar. Shame, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
“His real name is Joel Fishman. He lives in Prospect Park, not far from here. He’s married and has two kids, a boy and a girl. He has taught French for more than twenty years. No real record. One DUI eight years ago. Ran for town council six years ago.”
“A citizen.”
“A citizen, yes, Mr. Bolitar.”
“How did you get all that information?”
“At first, I considered seducing him so that he’d take me back to his place. You know. Pillow talk. But I knew you’d be against my defiling myself like that.”
“I would never let you use your body for evil, Big Cyndi.”
“Only sin?”
Myron smiled. “Exactly.”
“So I followed him from the club. He took public transportation, the last train out at two seventeen A.M. He walked home to Seventy-four Beechmore Drive. I called the address in to Esperanza.”
From there, it would only take a few keystrokes to learn all. Welcome to the computer age, boys and girls. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Joel Fishman goes by the name Crush at the club.”
Myron shook his head.
“And the ponytail is a clip-on. Like a hair extension.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, Mr. Bolitar, I’m not. I guess he wears it as a disguise.”
“So now what?”
“There’s no school today, only teacher conferences. Normally the security here is pretty tight, but I bet you could go in pretending you’re a parent.” She put her hand up, stifling a grin. “As Esperanza might note, in those jeans and blue blazer, you’d fit right in.”
Myron pointed to his feet. “In Ferragamo loafers?”
He headed across the street and waited until he saw a few parents heading for the door. Then he caught up to them and said hello like he knew them. They said hello back, pretending the same. Myron held the door, the wife walked through, the husband insisted Myron follow, Myron did with a hearty parental laugh.
And Big Cyndi thought she knew how to blend.
There was a signup sheet and a security guard behind the desk. Myron walked over, signed in as David Pepe, making the last name somewhat unreadable. He took a sticker name tag, wrote “David” on it, “Madison’s Dad” in smaller print beneath. Myron Bolitar, Man of a Thousand Faces, Master of Disguise.