The Chelsea Girl Murders (11 page)

“No, thanks.”

“Irene, bring me a boilermaker,” he yelled.

When Irene brought his boilermaker, I asked her about Nadia. She looked at the picture and handed it back with a frown, shooting darts at me with her eyes.

“That's enough, Irene. Back to work,” Stinky said, slapping her ass.

Irene couldn't help smiling when he did this. She stood there, blushing, for a moment, until a new customer, a security guard, came in and sat down at the bar, well away from the miserable loner.

Stinky said to me, “Men and women should be coconspirators, doncha think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Coconspirators,” Stinky said. “They should plot together against the government, the churches, the institutions, the husbands, the wives, all of 'em that are trying to keep 'em apart.”

“Well, in a way, my young lovers are doing just that,” I said, trying to get back on the topic.

“What can you tell me about you?” he asked.

In the background, I saw his wife, glaring at me while sharpening a big knife.

“I'm boring, Stinky,” I said.

He did the eyebrow thing again. He had an endearing, lopsided grin, marred now by the gold tooth, and with a little imagination one could see the face of a handsome, cocky young man. It was kind of cute that he didn't realize he'd lost that old magic. But did this guy really think he could pick me up … right in front of his wife? What balls. Did his wife really think there was any threat at all of this happening? And why was she chopping that corned beef with such fury?

“How come you haven't been by before? Listen,” he said, his voice lowered to a rough whisper. “Irene goes to see her sister Daisy on Thursdays. Why don't you come back then?”

“I'm busy on Thursdays, Stinky, but thanks,” I said. “You've got a nice wife there. Have you been married long?”

“Twenty years.”

“Kids?”

“I hoped to have children, but Irene, she was in an industrial accident at her old job in a pesticide plant. It made her barren and cost her her sense of smell. But the settlement bought us this bar.”

“You ought to look after her, be nice to her,” I said. “Pretty lady like that. You two are meant for each other.”

He grinned at my chastisement like a naughty boy who just couldn't help himself, light reflecting off his gold tooth. I hesitated before giving the hound my card, then decided he was harmless and handed it to him with the Chelsea number written on the back.

“Call me if this girl comes in here. And keep this on the QT.”

“Always on the QT. I'm a discreet guy,” he said, with a lewd emphasis on the word “discreet.”

Irene yelled at him to take a call, and Stinky left me with a clammy grope of a handshake.

Well, it had been a long shot. The matchbook was probably put in the book by Maggie Mason before she loaned it to Nadia, and the message inside was not code at all, as there really was a guy named Stinky at the Bus Stop Bar & Grill, a friend of Tamayo's. (Her affection for people of all kinds was almost as embracing as that of the good, Christian nuns Mrs. Ramirez was staying with. Maybe more so.)

Not sure where to go next, I ambled toward Canal Street and Chinatown. How quiet the city had become. At the moment, I could hear no honking horns, no sirens, no boom boxes, no hollering workmen, no screaming teenagers. The people weren't talking, to each other or to themselves, they were just walking forward, silently, steadily. It was so quiet you could hear the electricity humming inside office buildings, the wind blowing, the eerie tinkle of wind chimes somewhere. It was spooky, it was
Twilight Zone.
In my absence, someone had replaced the old city with this impostor. Through all the changes the city had undergone it had heretofore retained that energy and attitude that propelled eight million dreams and/or nightmares. But both those things were lagging now.

This was what really bugged me about the new New York. It wasn't just the gentrification of the Lower East Side, or that Times Square had gone from a steamy sleaze pot to the equivalent of Las Vegas's Glitter Gulch, cold and shiny, or the erosion of small personal freedoms. It was kind of low-energy, low-grade passivity that seemed to be everywhere. People were more polite, but not nearly as friendly. The whole city was becoming circumspect.

Chinatown, with its blaring Taiwanese music and merchants calling out to each other, was a welcome relief. I had to get food for the manboy—it was freakish how much food disappeared into that fuzzy young maw—and I was thinking a healthy stir-fry might be just the ticket. The food he had asked me to get was all crap—beer, Coca-Cola, chocolate, potato chips. What he needed was fruit and vegetables and protein, milk for strong bones, and some canned things he could prepare for himself while I was out finding his girlfriend.

When I got back, my arms were full of bulging bags of groceries—in paper, not plastic. I knocked on the door with my foot, hoping Rocky would answer and help me out. But he didn't. I had to put the bags down, unlock the door, pick up the bags, bumble in, and try, unsuccessfully, to slam the door shut with my foot so Louise Bryant wouldn't get out.

Before I could put the groceries down and close the door, I heard a man in the “living room,” beyond the colored parchment partition, talking in an agitated fashion in another language.

I peeked into the living room. Rocky was standing, faced-off with the man in the bad toupee. When the guy in the bad toupee saw me, he made a sharp, surprised noise, and ran toward me.

I couldn't swear to it, but I thought he had a gun. Without even thinking, I threw the groceries at the man in the bad toupee and unleashed my brain-freezing shriek. Cans rolled and spun on the floor. The guy in the bad toupee was stunned for a moment, but not long enough for me to jump him. He ran past me, stomping on a box of Granola.

“Call the front desk,” I said to Rocky. “Tell them to stop the man in the bad toupee and call the cops.”

When I turned to run after him, I tripped on a can of chili. To his credit, Rocky came to help me up, but just made me lose my balance again.

“Don't help me, call the desk,” I said, and took off down the hallway.

The man in the bad toupee had taken the stairs circling down to the first floor. I could see him two floors below me. As I ran down after him, I screamed, “Stop him! Stop the man in the bad toupee!”

I was screaming at no one.

Luckily, the man in the bad toupee was older and more sluggish than I, and I was gaining on him, with just one floor between us by the time I got to the third-floor landing. By the time he got to the ground floor, I was a mere half flight behind him. He tore through the lobby, where I ran into, literally, two of the Mary Sue convention women in pastel suits by the elevator.

“Stop the man in the bad toupee,” I screamed, pushing past them and accidentally knocking over the dark-haired, uptight one who looked like a younger, meaner Marilyn Quayle.

When I got to the street, at first the man was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw him, down the block, in front of the Aristocrat Deli, getting into a cab. It pulled away before I could reach it, but not before I'd made a note of the hack number on the top of the taxi, BF62. I looked for a cab, ready to jump in and demand that the driver “Follow that cab!” But the first available cab I saw was half a block back, behind a delivery truck and a city bus.

“BF62,” I said, reciting the hack number on the cab. I didn't have a pen on me. So I wouldn't forget it, I repeated it aloud as I went inside the Chelsea Hotel. With the help of a source in the taxi industry, I could track that hack and find out where the guy in the bad toupee had gone.

“BF62,” I said, getting on the elevator as the doors were about to close.

The uptight, dark-haired tourist lady in the pink suit and her shorter friend were on the elevator.

“BF62, BF62,” I said. “I have to remember those numbers, they're very important. BF62. Do you have a pen?”

The tourist lady in the pink suit was against the wall of the elevator, looking at me with alarm. She reached into her purse, maybe for a pen or maybe for a gun.

“BF62. I'm not nuts, I just have to remember BF62, BF62, BF62.”

“Here,” said the uptight one suddenly, pulling a pen out and handing it to me while holding her body back. It was the way someone gives their wallet to a mugger: Take it, but spare my life! She must have had another bad day in the Big Apple.

“BF62,” I wrote on the back of a receipt in my pocket. “Thanks.”

We were all getting off on seven, but they held back until I was gone. As I went into Tamayo's, I looked back and saw them poking their heads out of the elevator to make sure I was well down the hallway before getting off.

“She's the one who found the body,” one of them said.

“She's crazy. Did she kill him?” asked the other.

At Tamayo's, Rocky was smoking and pacing nervously in the living room.

“Did you call the desk?”

“Yes, but they put me on hold,” he said.

“Who was that guy?”

“The man Nadia is supposed to marry,” he said. “I didn't recognize him with the toupee, and he said he had news of Nadia, so I opened the door.…”

“Rocky, don't let anyone in here but me. Okay? Jesus. If someone has real information on Nadia, have them call you from the house phone in the lobby. Did he have a gun?”

“Yes, a big one.”

“Fuck. Okay, I'm calling the cops,” I said.

“NO! You think the police will find Nadia before he does? Or her family does? If you call the police, you are putting Nadia's life, and my life, at risk.”

Those people who always seem to know the right thing to do, instinctively, who don't have to weigh all the pros and cons, are really lucky. It just seems that too often, the right thing turns out to be the wrong thing, causing some worse thing to happen.

“I have to think. You have to think too,” I said.

Rocky, with some coaxing, helped me shove an armoire in front of the door, in case the man in the bad toupee came back with a gang of wig-wearing friends. I called a guy I knew who owned a cab company and left a message asking him to find out where BF62 dropped a man in a bad toupee. It would take a day or two, he figured, to find the driver.

Rocky picked up groceries off the floor—not all of them, just the things he felt like eating at that particular moment. He wasn't happy with the food choices and made a face.

“Did you find out anything today?” I asked him.

“No! I couldn't find any of Nadia's American friends. One girl, Amanda, moved to Washington. I can't remember her last name,” he said, putting the can of chili into the microwave.

“You can't microwave it that way,” I said. “You have to open the can and put the chili into a microwave-safe container.”

“What's a microwave-safe container?”

“It's … I'll do it,” I said. I had to microwave Louise's special cat food and bok choy dinner anyway. “Do you know Miriam Grundy?”

“Who?”

“Weren't you supposed to meet Miriam Grundy with Nadia?”

“I don't know. We were supposed to meet someone. I don't remember names.”

“Nadia left here with her suitcase and stuff, and went up to see Miriam Grundy instead of waiting for you.”

“I was supposed to meet her after her meeting,” he said. “I got lost …”

The microwave dinged. He sat down at the table while I retrieved his chow and put it in front of him with a spoon and a fork.

“You're going to have just that for lunch? Chili?”

“Do you have beer?” he asked.

“It's in the fridge.”

“I drank what was there.”

“All of it? Well, I didn't buy more beer,” I said. I poured him a glass of milk and put some salad-in-a-bag and fresh fruit salad on a plate for him.

“I'll try to track the cabbie who picked up the man in the bad toupee, see where that goes. In the meantime, I don't think it's safe for you to stay here, Rocky,” I said.

“But I must, in case Nadia comes back.”

“Well, I think we know why Nadia hasn't come back, don't we? Someone is definitely after her. Is there somewhere else you can go, someplace I can contact you and we can keep up-to-date on this?”

“No. There is no such place. I stay here,” he said.

The phone rang and I picked up, hoping it was Nadia, or at the very least, Maggie Mason.

“Hello,” I said.

“Robin, this is Dulcinia,” I heard.

Before she finished saying her name, I started talking again. “You have reached Tamayo Scheinman's answering machine. Nobody is here right now. Leave a message after the beep, and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”

Then I hit the nine on the phone to approximate an answering-machine beep.

That was a close call. Mrs. Ramirez would keep me on the phone for hours if she could. Instead, she dictated her message into my ear.

“I am sorry I missed you, Robin. I'm just calling to see how you're doing. Señor and I are fine. We are at the Sisters of the Wretched Souls, and it's a lovely place, an oasis of virtue, although there's no public transportation anywhere close, and some of the nuns … a few of them seem to be more interested in cakes and pastry than prayers. Yesterday, I caught a bit of a news story during TV hour, about a mugging on East Eleventh Street. Did you see that? The police sketch looked a lot like that man—you know the one? The Russian boy who lived with the old man in the red building on Ninth Street who sat on his stoop and swore at children until he had that stroke and couldn't swear anymore and he just spit at them?”

Until he couldn't spit anymore, then he just opened his mouth and wheezed loudly instead, à la the bad guy in David Lynch's
Blue Velvet
.

Mrs. Ramirez continued. “I tried calling Richard Bigger but that home number you gave me for him doesn't work anymore, and June Fairchild isn't returning my calls. Will you please call me?”