“Sure there is,” I said. “Because you’d become convinced that she was going to kill you.”
“Why would Sylvia want to kill me?”
“Well, for starters, she hated you . . .”
“Boo hoo.”
“And maybe because she wanted your country estates right now. The ones you’d neglected to tell her you were donating to the Veterans Administration. Maybe she didn’t want to wait around for another six or eight years for you to kick off. Maybe she wanted to get away from publishing—and you—right now and enjoy life for a change.”
“Nice little yarn,” Addison said. “Mind if I steal it for my next book?”
“It’s yours. I’m still curious about one thing. If you knew that Yvette was a fake, why did you hire her?”
“She was a good typist. Easy on the eyes, too. Or eye, in my case.”
“And why did you marry her?”
“Have you seen that ass?”
“She’s an attractive woman,” Very acknowledged.
“Attractive doesn’t begin to describe it, Lieutenant. That creature oozes eroticism. When I married her, I could still rise to the occasion with some regularity. Her sort of woman is what it takes for a man of my years to get it up, and they are not easy to find. I married her because I didn’t want to lose her.”
“Yet you don’t treat her very well,” I pointed out.
He looked at me in astonishment. “Why would you say that?”
“You hurled a Perrier bottle at her yesterday, remember? You could have injured her badly if you’d hit her.”
“That was nothing. I’m just a mean old bastard. Is that a crime, Lieutenant?”
“Wasn’t the last time I looked.” Very resumed pacing. Lulu lifted her head and watched him, then let out a low grumble and went back to dozing. “As it happens, it’s quite plausible.”
Addison shook his head at him. “What is?”
“That you strolled your way up to West 93rd and killed Tommy O’Brien yourself. I understand from one of the doormen that you went out for a walk in the rain two hours before he was murdered. Didn’t return until well after he was thrown from Hoagy’s roof.”
“All true. I love walking in the rain. Would you believe that Maui still remains my bestselling title even though I wrote it more than twenty years ago?”
“People,” I said, “want to believe that there’s such a thing as paradise.”
“People,” he said, “are idiots.”
“Where did you walk to?” Very asked him.
“Zabar’s.”
“That fancy deli on Broadway?”
“It’s not a deli, Lieutenant.” He tut-tutted. “It’s the closest thing we have to a European food hall. They sell everything there. Smoked fish. Fresh ground coffee beans. Exotic spices. I love to stroll around in Zabar’s and inhale all of the scents. Smell is such a powerful sense memory, especially when your sight is failing. When I’m in Zabar’s, I’m back in Paris in 1952 with my whole life ahead of me—unlike now. Mind you, my doctor says my health is excellent for a man my age. My greatest fear is that I’ll suffer a stroke and end up imprisoned in some nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair all day in a puddle of my own urine.”
“Better your own than someone else’s,” I pointed out.
“I’d blow my brains out if it came to that.”
“Do you keep a weapon?” Very asked him.
Addison patted the desk with his right hand. “In my top drawer—a .38-caliber Ruger Service Six revolver.”
“Loaded?”
“No point in having it there if it’s not.”
“Got a license for it?”
“Haven’t the slightest idea.”
Very studied him curiously. “Do you mind if I make a personal observation, sir?”
Addison heaved an impatient sigh. “If you must.”
“You don’t seem particularly upset about what’s gone down. In fact, I’m getting no emotional hit off you at all. Sylvia was your only child and your editor. Tommy was your researcher and collaborator. Between them, they were your support system. Now they’re both dead, yet you don’t seem to care.”
The old man shook his bald pink head at him. “You have no idea what it’s like, do you? War, I mean.”
“No sir, I don’t,” Very conceded.
“If I allow myself to care I’ll lose my fighting edge and then . . .” He snapped his fingers. “I’ll be dead, too. I’m here, they’re not. That’s the stark reality of it. So I have to keep going.”
“Keep writing, you mean?” I asked him.
“Absolutely. I’m still under contract. Still have to keep producing new books. But first I have to get that damned Tulsa manuscript back.”
“Do you think you will?” Very asked him.
“I know I will. Whoever took it wants money for it. Everything’s about money. As soon as they contact me, they’ll get their money, I’ll get my manuscript back and you’ll arrest them, won’t you, Lieutenant?”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Besides, I still have a support system. I have Yvette, who’s been screening my calls today. I have Mark Kaplan. Furthermore, I’m not the helpless, doddering old fool that you seem to think I am. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No, we’re good,” Very said.
“Then please excuse me. Yvette has prepared a list of phone calls from journalists that I have to return. A nuisance, but when the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post call, they mustn’t be ignored.” Addison reached for the phone, squinted at Yvette’s list and began dialing a number. As far as he was concerned, we weren’t there anymore. He’d dismissed us.
We left, sliding the pocket door shut behind us.
“Can’t say I’ve ever encountered a cooler customer,” Very murmured as we strolled down the hall. “I wonder if that was all just an act for our benefit and he’s in there sobbing like a baby right now.”
“You keep forgetting that he was one of Wild Bill’s boys.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning it was no act. He’s killed plenty of people.”
“That was during the war.”
“Don’t be so sure. I have no doubt he was capable of killing Tommy.”
“If he went to Zabar’s like he said, it’ll be easy to check out.”
“He still could have gone to my place from there and killed him. Same as he could have hired someone to run Sylvia down.”
“Someone like who?”
“Good question.”
Yvette heard our voices as we neared her suite and intercepted us from her open doorway. “Was Addy able to tell you anything?”
“Not very much, Mrs. James,” Very said politely.
“It’s Yvette, hon. He say anything about me?”
“Such as . . . ?”
“He’s not going to throw me out, is he?”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s crazy, didn’t you notice? Plus he’s been sore at me ever since I retained Mel.”
“Actually, he said you were a vital part of his support team. He was highly complimentary. Isn’t that right, Hoagy?”
“Absolutely.”
“For real?” she asked us, sounding woeful and helpless. Or trying to. She didn’t quite pull it off. “Wow, that’s sure a load off my mind. Hang on one sec, will you, Lieutenant? I want to give you my direct line.” She darted into her sitting room, scribbled her phone number on a piece of notepaper and handed it to Very same as she’d handed it to me yesterday. “If there’s anything I can do, call me, okay? Day or night.”
“Sure thing,” he said, pocketing it.
She looked him over with those huge blue eyes of hers. “You got a girlfriend?”
“Not presently, no.”
“So call me.”
“I don’t usually date married women.”
She gazed up at him through her eyelashes. “But for me you’ll make an exception, won’t you?” Then she got up
on her tiptoes, plastered her barely sheathed assets against his chest and kissed him smack on the mouth. I’m not talking about any kindergarten kiss either. I’m talking about a long, slow, wet one. When she finally pulled away, her eyes twinkled at him mischievously.
“I’ll certainly think about it,” Very responded, his voice sounding admirably close to normal.
“You do that, hon. You think about it.”
Chapter Seven
I hate this place,” Very fumed as we followed Lulu down one of the labyrinthine paths toward No. 11 Stuyvesant Oval. The day was becoming stiflingly humid, with not so much as a trace of a breeze. The heavy air smelled strongly of the fetid East River. “I had a thing with a Barnard girl for a while when I was at Columbia. She lived at home in Oval No. 7. I was always a half hour late when I came to pick her up because I always got lost trying to find her building. She decided I was an inconsiderate prick and dumped me.”
“I can’t find my way around here either. I think they laid it out this way on purpose to dissuade ‘undesirables’ from wandering about. Did you know they banned blacks from living here until 1950?”
“I did not. Gives me another good reason to hate it.”
“What you need is a basset hound. Lulu always remembers the way.”
“Dude, what I need is a complete and total absence of professional ethics for thirty minutes. Hell, I’d settle for twenty.”
“During which time you would . . . ?”
“Rip that dress off Yvette James and ravage the hell out of her, what else? I mean, she is the hottest babe I’ve been around in months.” He let out a pained sigh. “I wonder if she knew she was giving me a boner.”
“I’d say Yvette was well aware that she was getting a rise out of you.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
“People respond to grief and loss in different ways. Some can’t stop crying. Others have an overwhelming urge to find out whether the detective investigating the case still has his tonsils.”
“Dude, I’m being serious here.”
“To disarm you. She wants you docile and in her corner.”
“Sometimes I wish I had just a teeny-tiny Richie Filosi streak in me, you know? Richie’s kind would have made a date with her on the spot and not given it a second thought.”
“But that’s not you?”
“She’s a person of interest in two homicides. No way I can allow myself to get personally involved with her. Besides, she’s not my type.”
“You have a type?”
“Oh, most def. Brainy. I’m attracted to brainy women of high integrity, a concept that’s not even on Richie Filosi’s radar screen. He didn’t see anything wrong with faking a disability and bilking the taxpayers out of their hard-earned money. His sort make me sick.”
“I’m glad you’re not like Richie, Lieutenant—even if it does consign you to a state of pulsating tumescence.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because if you were, then we wouldn’t be friends.”
He shot a glance over at me. “We’re friends?”
“Aren’t we?”
He shrugged his rippling shoulders in his tight black T-shirt. “I don’t really know. Don’t have many friends. I seem to rub people the wrong way.”
“As do I. See? We have a lot in common, setting aside that I’m the superior dresser, not to mention the first major new literary voice of the 1980s.”
“Dude, these are the nineties.”
“Thank you large for pointing that out.”
“You’re welcome large.”
Lulu led us directly to the building. I buzzed. Kathleen let us in. She was waiting for us in the corridor outside of the apartment, wearing a baggy T-shirt, baggy shorts and flip-flops. She looked exhausted and emotionally drained.
“Kathleen O’Brien, this is Detective Lieutenant Romaine Very, the city’s top homicide investigator. They’ve sent you the best.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. O’Brien.”
“What loss?” she said to him bitterly. “He’d dumped me. Took up with a young babe.”
I said, “You and Tommy were married for twenty-two years and have two beautiful girls. The love doesn’t go away.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she acknowledged morosely. “Come on in.”
The living room wasn’t nearly as spotless as it had been yesterday. The coffee table was strewn with empty coffee mugs and cans of Ballantine ale, which I happen to think tastes remarkably like soapy dishwater. Newspapers were scattered on the sofa.
She led us into the kitchen, where a fresh box of Entenmann’s doughnuts was parked on the table and another person was parked in a chair there, drinking hot coffee and smoking a Marlboro. The muggy air was heavy with cigarette smoke.
“This is my friend Richie,” Kathleen said. “Richie, this is Tommy’s friend Stewart Hoag and Lieutenant Very, who’s investigating his murder.”
Richie Filosi got up out of his chair with a grunt, reeking of Aqua Velva. He was a big, thickly built guy in his late forties with a droopy salt-and-pepper mustache. Wore his thinning strands of hair in a comb-over that I can’t imagine fooled anyone except himself. Richie was dressed in a horizontal-striped tank top that did an excellent job of accentuating his beer gut, blue jean cutoffs, and dark blue Pumas with a pair of knee-high striped tube socks that were all the rage back when Earl “The Pearl” Monroe was wowing Knick fans at Madison Square Garden. The man was into gold. He wore a heavy gold chain around his neck with some kind of pendant on it that meant nothing to me, a gold ID bracelet on his right wrist and a gold watch on his left that I would have said was a Rolex knock-off except that he was a bent cop, so it just may have been a real one that he confiscated in a raid and kept. He had a tan, but it wasn’t a healthy one. You could see the broken blood vessels of a heavy drinker in his puffy face.
He threw his shoulders back and stuck out his chin, sizing Very up. “So you’re Dante Feldman’s boy,” he said in a raspy voice.
“I’m not anybody’s boy,” Very shot back, bristling.
“Cool off, brother. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“Sure you did. You’re trying to piss me off so I’ll ask you to leave. Not a chance, Richie. Sit the hell down. Oh, and I’m not your brother.” This was a side of Very I’d never seen. He was polite and deferential around celebrities. But he was dealing with one of his own now. One of his own whom he considered a lowlife. “So tell me, Richie, how are you getting by without your pension?”
Kathleen looked at Richie in surprise. “What does he mean by that? You told me you collect a pension and your disability payments.”
“My lawyer’s working at getting them restored,” Richie assured her. “Just a slight technicality.”
Very let out a harsh laugh. “Is that what you call faking an injury in the line of duty? A slight technicality?”
“I served,” he said defensively. “I ought to be eligible to collect my retiree benefits.”
“If it were up to me, you’d be eligible for jail time,” Very said with total contempt as Kathleen watched them go at it, wide-eyed.
“I do odd jobs here and there,” Richie said.
Very glared at him. “What?”
“That’s how I get by, in answer to your question.”
“You mean like running over a middle-aged lady who was out getting her mail?”
“I had nothing to do with what went down in Willoughby last night. You can’t pin that on me. I don’t care how much juice you have at One P.P. What I meant was, I install screen doors, paint kitchens . . .”
“That must be hard with those herniated discs in your back.”
“You just going to keep busting my chops?” Richie demanded angrily.
“I don’t know. Haven’t made up my mind yet.”
Lulu had made up her mind. She went to the fridge, sat and stared at it.
“Does that mean she wants another anchovy?” Kathleen asked me.
�
��I’m afraid so.”
Kathleen fetched her one from the jar in the door of the fridge, once again nearly losing a finger in the transaction, before she sat back down and lit a Kent, dragging on it deeply.
Richie looked at me in amazement. “Your dog eats anchovies? What is she, weird?”
Lulu bared her teeth at him, growling.
He eyed her warily. “Why’s she doing that?”
“She seems to have taken an instant dislike to you.”
“How come?”
“Saves time,” Very said.
“Possibly because you’re wearing Aqua Velva. She was once kicked in the ribs by a guy who was wearing Aqua Velva.”
“But that wasn’t me,” Richie pointed out.
Then again, I reflected, maybe her large, wet black nose had detected the brawny, urinal-cake scent of Aqua Velva in my apartment. I hadn’t, but I’m not a scent hound. Maybe it was Richie who’d picked my lock and bugged my phone. Maybe his old pal Jocko from the two-four had thrown the job his way.
Kathleen swiped at the tears that had welled up suddenly in her eyes. “I still can’t believe Tommy’s gone. I’ve known him since we were nine years old. We grew up in the same building.”
“Are your girls coming home from school to be with you?” I asked.
“This afternoon. The fall semester just started, too. But they don’t care. They’re both so upset.”
“I’m just glad I could be here,” Richie said, patting her hand. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
“Somebody put a tap on Hoagy’s phone,” Very said to Kathleen. “Tommy made several calls from there yesterday. One of them was to you.”
“Yes.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “Not long after Hoagy was here. He told me not to believe what people were saying. That he hadn’t stolen Tulsa.”
“How did he sound?”
“Scared. I’d never heard Tommy sound so frightened.” To me she said, “He told me I could trust you. I told him you’d already been here and had looked around in his office.”
The Man in the White Linen Suit Page 14