Super in the City (32 page)

“They got him.” Gregory was at the foot of my bed, hastily pulling on his pants.

Oh, right. Gregory. I smiled lazily. “They got Hayden?” I said, still half- asleep. I clamped my hand over my mouth. Jesus, Zephyr, wake up.

“Who? No, they got Alonzo Pelarose. He’s in custody. Across the hall. Came back at four- thirty this morning to try to kill Roxana. Stupid people make our job a lot easier.” The thunder was the pounding of law enforcement feet up and down the stairs.

“Oh my God!” I was awake. No one had expected action this quickly. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. Hungover and rattled, but fine. How are you?” Gregory said, his voice suddenly soft. He sat down on the side of the bed and stroked my face.

“I’m great,” I purred, realizing I wasn’t even worried about morning breath around him.

“Great,” he said, jumping up, pillow talk concluded. “I’m sorry, Zeph, but I have to …” He nodded his head toward the door.

I was forever destined to be ditched by men for crime scenes.

“Kind of convenient,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t know how I was going to explain myself to the guys this morning. This way, I was only checking on you just now.”

I tried to smile, but my heart was already tightening at the thought of Gregory, the undercover detective, trying to make conversation with Zephyr, the super of her mommy and daddy’s building. For him, I thought, I’d go back to medical school. Anything to keep him interested.

He threw on his shirt and ran his hands through his hair. “Instead of that picnic …”

He was already losing interest. I pulled the comforter higher over my chest.

“… what do you say we go on a field trip to Rikers this afternoon and ask James about his science project?” Just a few hours earlier, we’d sprawled naked on my living room rug, punchy with exhaustion, giggling over the possible purposes of James’s test tubes.

“Really?” I said eagerly. Prison! Even my dad had never taken me to a prison. This was a sad, somber thing, I reminded myself. I toned down my voice. “That would be great.”

Gregory came to my side again and put his hand over mine.

“Is there anything that doesn’t excite you? It’s amazing to watch your face.”

Well, now. This was news. I tried to smile in an excited way. He frowned.

“Are you okay?”

I cleared my throat. “Go. Do your thing. Let me know when you want to leave. I’ll be here.”

T
WO HOURS LATER, GREGORY AND I WERE ZIPPING ALONG THE
BQE toward Rikers Island in an undercover police car posing as a gypsy cab, complete with rosary and E-ZPass. I had an oily box of Bleecker Street pizza in my lap. It wasn’t wine and candlelight, but so far, it was the best date I’d ever been on. Gregory glanced over at me and smiled.

“What?”

“Your eyes are super green this morning.”

I snorted and nearly choked on my pizza.

“Is that funny?”

“Let’s just say there’s never been a consensus on the color of my eyes.”

“Are you kidding? Look at them, they’re green. Like emeralds. Like algae. Look!” he insisted, pulling down the sun visor so I could look at myself in the mirror. Maybe it was just the blob of grease glistening on my cheek that made my eyes brighter than usual, but they really did look pretty green. I was so used to having “ish” eyes, I wasn’t sure what to do with this definitive, incontrovertible evidence: I’m Zephyr. I have green eyes. I helped snare a murderous mafioso. I bit my lip to keep from grinning at myself, and flipped the visor back up.

“Ask me things,” Gregory said, his mouth partly open as he tried to cool off a bite of hot cheese.

“Okay.” I wiped the grease off my face. “Was there actually any poison in your exterminator canister?”

He glanced over at me as if he was going to give me a hard time, then changed his mind.

“Yes. I didn’t think it would be nice to let your building get overrun with roaches just because we’d arrested your super.”

“Are you qualified to spray poison?” I said, sheepishly aware that I was once again trying to prove to him that I was good at my job.

“Seriously? These are your questions?”

“I have a responsibility to my tenants,” I said primly.

Gregory blew out his cheeks impatiently.

“Here’s what happened,” he said, pressing hard on the horn as a cabbie cut him off. “I was working with the rackets bureau in the DA’s office, looking at oil companies all over the city. The company James was dealing with—the one you guys were buying oil from—got red- flagged, and then I got very interested in James and started digging deeper. There was stuff in his taps-wiretaps—that was completely baffling. Like, I thought there were a lot more people involved, but it turned out—”

“That sometimes he’s British and sometimes he’s Brooklyn!” I said excitedly. “Did he use the Brooklyn voice? I’d never heard it till the night he was arrested!”

“A lot of Brooklyn,” Gregory said, smiling, and I hoped that this was one of those occasions where my enthusiasm was attractive. “So, yeah, I thought it was multiple people, and that kept me guessing for a while. But I didn’t have a clue until I met you and saw the staircase and those two locked rooms in Roxana’s apartment that Roxana and her girls were in the picture. No idea.” He shook his head, mildly disgusted with himself.

“So why didn’t you wait to arrest him? Until you could find out more?”

Gregory glanced over at me approvingly. “I wanted to wait, but sometimes there are assholes who—” He took a deep breath through his nose and waved away his incipient tirade. “My boss and I disagreed and he went ahead with the arrest. Prematurely, very prematurely.”

He reached over and put his hand on my thigh. So warm. Did he always radiate this kind of delicious heat? I’d save in heating bills this winter, I thought stupidly.

“Any other questions?”

I hesitated. Don’t blow it, Zephyr. Don’t move backward when you can move forward. But the devil homunculus was restless.

“Why did you keep making me feel so bad about saying you didn’t look like an exterminator? You weren’t one. Aren’t one.”

He took his hand back and I felt like I’d been abandoned.

“Because I thought maybe you were a snob.” He squinted through the windshield.

I cringed. “But all I was saying was that you didn’t
look
like one, not that you couldn’t
be
one or that I wouldn’t date one,” I insisted, certain now that this was the absolute truth. Frus trated, I tossed my pizza crust back into the box. How much proof would he need?

“I believe you,” he said after a moment. “I’m sorry. It was an unfair position to put you in.” He moved his hand to my leg again and squeezed, silently asking me to forgive him for being such a complicated pain in the ass.

A plane loomed low over the highway, coming in for a landing at LaGuardia. I studied its metal underbelly and realized that if it were to crash into us at that moment, I was glad I’d be going down beside Gregory. I pushed away the thought. He was a complicated pain in the ass and I was a morbid psycho. It was looking like we might be perfect for each other.

I looked over at him, to find him looking back at me expectantly.
He had a blob of tomato sauce on his cheek. I leaned over and gently licked it off.

“So you really never noticed anything unusual going on upstairs?” he said happily, gunning past a dyspeptic diesel truck.

“You don’t ever have to worry about speeding tickets, do you?” I said with awe, as impressed as if he’d invented the radar gun.

“Nope.” He grinned at me. “Are you a lead foot?”

I shrugged. Points on a license was the stuff of fourth or fifth dates.

“I try not to be nosy,” I lied, in answer to his first question.

“Nosy? There was an entire stairwell on your property that escaped your attention!”

“Hey, listen,” I said sharply, “not all of us are cut out to be undercover cops. I didn’t notice it.” I glared at him, waiting for the next time he glanced away from the wheel. But he only smiled. Now that he could be himself around me, he was unflappable. It was both completely annoying and a huge relief.

“Well, I think you’d be a great detective.”

“Ha.” I slumped back in the seat. I felt vulnerable, remembering our heart- to- heart on the stoop. He knew exactly where I stood, career- wise.

“I’m serious. You need a pretty rich imagination to piece together something like the Roxana-Pelarose connection. I was working on James for months and I never got that close. That’s one aspect of detective work—trying to imagine all the permutations of how the different pieces fit together. Some truth is more outrageous than what most people can imagine.”

I still wasn’t sure whether he was putting me on.

“And I think,” he continued, turning the car onto a low causeway, “that our ability to distinguish between truth, fiction, and mental illness is about to be tested. Welcome to the isle of Rikers.”

*  *  *  

Z
EPHYR, LOVE! DARLING! AREN’T YOU SPLENDID TO COME PAY
your uncle James a visit!”

Three weeks in prison had rendered James sallow and bruised. His shoulders were hunched and his beard was an overgrown tangle, but you would have thought we were having high tea at the Savoy. Instead, we were sitting at a cafeteria-style table in a gray- tiled cavern surrounded by armed guards. James rubbed his unshackled wrists and looked genuinely delighted to see me.

James was considered a low security risk, but apparently, I was a high one. Despite Gregory’s badge, I had been put through the ringer by a wall of a woman manning the X-ray scanner. In another life, Corrections Officer Dredgeholz must have worked Checkpoint Charlie. She clearly pined for the fine, orderly days she had enjoyed in the eastern sector. She patted me down three times, ran her hand scanner over my beeping jeans zipper three times, and made me take off my shoes and my fleece vest (picked with great care to convey a sexy, athletic look to Gregory). She ordered me to empty my backpack and pawed through my things with the delicacy of a grizzly bear in a campground.

It was one thing to sleep with someone, but an entirely other rite of intimacy to have the contents of your backpack emptied out in front of him. I blushed hotly as Dredgeholz examined a crumpled but clean panty liner, a handful of ATM receipts broadcasting my triple- digit bank balance, a linty ChapStick with no cap, another linty ChapStick (mentholated) with no cap, a mildewed fold- up umbrella, a copy of 287 West 12th’s bylaws, which I’d been meaning to read, and a coffee-stained
Times
article about cervical cancer my mother had
clipped, with “You get your paps every year, right???” scrawled across it in red ink.

Gregory just crossed his arms and frowned at the proceedings. He may have been Gregory the detective now, but he still had the social graces of Gregory in the rat/roach jumpsuit. A decent guy would have looked away. I took a deep breath and reminded myself to accept his imperfections.

Of course, I felt no need to refrain from staring goggle-eyed when he handed over his revolver for lockup. In high school, right after I’d broken up with Lance the musical-theater aficionado, I’d briefly dated a stutterer named Nelson. He attended Dowling, the school for bad boys who’d been kicked out of other schools for bad boys. Nelson had carried nunchucks concealed in his lacrosse bag, but that was the closest I’d gotten to dating an armed man.

“Did you have that in my apartment last night?” I demanded as he stood at a counter to sign a custody form.

Gregory nodded.

“Where? Just lying around?”

“Of course not. I brought a lockbox with me.” Oh, for the days when condoms were enough preparation for a date.

“Do you always carry a gun?”

“Usually. Not always, but usually. Is that going to be a problem?” He looked at me worriedly. It was a bit of a problem, but I was momentarily blindsided by his casual allusion to our future together.

“Where was the lockbox?”

“Under the bed.”

Why,
why
was I continually attracted to men who left unsavory souvenirs beneath my bed? Was a gun, a locked- up gun, better than empty beer bottles? Yes, I decided there in front of the metal grille. Yes, it was.

“Who’s the handsome chap you’ve brought with you, Zephyr love?” James continued now.

“Mr. Windsor, don’t you remember me?”

James smiled at Gregory brightly, blankly.

“I was the new exterminator from Ridofem? We met a few weeks ago?”

Nothing.

Gregory glanced at me. Was this all an act or was James a very sick man?

“Mr. Windsor,” he tried again, leaning forward, “do you know why you’re here?”

James waved his arms forward. “Oh, a small misunderstanding between gentlemen. Straightened out in a jiff, no doubt, no doubt.”

“James,” I said, my concern growing. “Do you or do you not know someone named Alonzo Pelarose?” I looked hard into his eyes, but there wasn’t so much as a fleeting glimmer of recognition.

“Beautiful name, beautiful name. Another beau of yours, sweet Zephyr? You know what ‘Zephyr’ means?” he asked Gregory. “The west wind. A gentle, warming breeze. And she is, isn’t she?” He put his hand over mine affectionately.

“HANDS OFF!” three guards roared in unison, storming our table. My heart pounded as I imagined the ensuing riot. Smeared feces, flooded toilets, projectile chairs, murdered guards, trampled prisoners. I’d be despised from the Battery to the Bronx, and most of all by the Sterling Girls, who would be pissed to hear about everything that had happened to me in the last twenty- four hours from the media instead of from me.

The guards walked away and hushed conversations resumed all around us.

“James,” I pleaded, “what about Roxana? Roxana Boureau? Does she mean anything to you?”

“A whore.” Except it came out as “Uh hoah.” Brooklyn was now in the house.

Gregory and I sat up straighter.

“Fuckin’ bitch. Fuckin’ fuckin’ bitch did this shit to me!” James’s entire face squared off and turned bright red. His eyes grew hard and he didn’t seem to see us in front of him.

“What did she do?” Gregory said quietly, trying to hold on to this James while we had him.