by Jane Haddam
I stepped over a drunk and moved into the shelter of a doorway to wait, conscious that I was doing the wrong thing. I should have been heading for the street, moving out into traffic, waving for a taxi or a cop. Instead, I leaned into my doorway, feeling small, tiny, infinitesimal, and nearly hysterical.
I closed my eyes and listened to the shoes, coming closer, coming faster, the sharp edge of the heel hitting the pavement like the sound of a fork against an empty glass. I waited until the very last moment. I waited until I could hear her breathing, coming painful and short against the cold. Then I stuck out my arm and grabbed the sleeve of her coat.
And stared right into the face of Lydia Wentward as she screamed.
CHAPTER 17
“THAT’S WHAT I NEED,” Lydia cooed at me. “They won’t mind. Nobody minds. Nobody sees. Just what I need.”
She put the edge of the small, silver tube against the fine white line of cocaine she had strung out along the dark wood restaurant table and sucked it up, using first one nostril and then the other. It went so fast I hardly noticed it.
“Sterling silver,” she told me, waving the tube in the air. “Got a sterling silver case, too. Bought them in a fancy jewelry store in Philadelphia. Nobody minds. They put needles in their arms in the bathrooms here.”
“Not the same,” I said, not doubting the story about the bathrooms. “If he sees you, he has to call the police.”
“He won’t call the police. He wouldn’t call the police if I stabbed someone at the bar.” She blinked at me and giggled. “Stabbing, stabbing,” she said. “That’s all we think about these days. Stabbing.”
“Right,” I said. I saw the waiter and signaled, wanting to get something heavily alcoholic into me before trying to find out what Lydia had been doing in Times Square, why she had been following me, why she hadn’t called out to get my attention. Then I reminded myself that she might not have been following me at all, that it might have been a coincidence, but I couldn’t swallow it. I couldn’t stomach this bar either, a lightless cave of cheap liquor and watered drinks just off the Forty-second Street meat strip.
The waiter came to the table, his fists in the pockets of his dirty white apron, his eyes on Lydia’s, smirking.
“Johnnie Walker Red on the rocks,” I said, hoping to forestall the almost inevitable Jack Daniel’s green label. “And she’ll have a bottle of Heineken beer.”
“No Heineken,” he said. “Budweiser, Miller, Molson’s.”
“Molson’s,” I said.
“Molson’s.” He gave us an exaggerated bow and left, swaying as he walked, in no particular hurry.
“Stabbing,” Lydia said, “is what it’s all about.”
“Is that what you were going to do tonight? Stab me in Times Square?”
Her eyes seemed to get wider and wider until the lids collapsed, shut tight against a fit of giggles.
“I can’t stab you. Not unless I buy one of those things the dykes wear, and I wouldn’t do that anyway, that’s second best. Third best. Men are second best and this is the best of all.” She waved her purse in the air. “Do you know there are a hundred and four separate terms for screwing?”
“And you know every one of them.”
“I’m keeping a list. In a notebook.” She leaned across the table until I could smell the dry garlic on her breath. “You know where I was? I was at Chappie’s.”
“What’s Chappie’s?”
“You know. You were there. I saw you in the street.”
“I was in the street getting hot chocolate. I wasn’t at Chappie’s.”
She sat back and pouted. “She wouldn’t let me go there. She said it was bad for me. But it isn’t.”
“Who wouldn’t let you go there?”
“Julie. Julie said I was going to get arrested, or crazy, but that was stupid, because if I’m not crazy now, I won’t be.”
“Maybe you are crazy now,” I said. “What were you doing following me? Why didn’t you just yell out? I thought you were trying to kill me.”
“They do that, too,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “On the top floor. Nobody’s supposed to know about it, but I do.”
“What do they do?”
“Kill people and take movies of it,” Lydia said placidly. “Girls.”
I reached automatically for my cigarettes, not really believing her, not disbelieving her either. I didn’t know what to think or how to react. I couldn’t decide if she was stoned or crazy. I lit up and tossed the pack to her, because she seemed to want it, and then the waiter came with the drinks. The scotch was watery and the Molson’s came with a filthy glass, but it was a welcome change.
“Four-fifty,” the waiter said.
I came up with a five.
“Keep it,” I said.
He gave us another exaggerated bow.
“Too fat,” Lydia said as he walked away. “They’re all too fat.”
“Who are?”
“Johns,” Lydia said. “That’s what we used to call them. Maybe they still call them that. Long time ago.” She sucked meditatively on her beer. “Did I show you what I got today? I got a real good one today. First class.”
She rolled up her sleeve and waved her arm in my face, then laid it down on the table and held it still. I took a deep drag and stared at the welts, the puncture marks, the razor-thin S curves of dried blood.
“All over me,” she said with satisfaction. “All over my—titties.” She let out a screeching giggle, choking a little as the sulfur from her match went up her nose. She threw it still burning in the ashtray and lit another.
“Look at this,” she said. She pulled up the hair at the back of her neck and showed me what looked like a cross between a scar and a tattoo, a small black outline of a heart with the letter 5 inside. “I got that in 1944, when I was eighteen years old. I’m fifty-five. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said, thinking: Phoebe. I’ll call Phoebe.
“I’m fifty-five. I’m the only old whore you’ll ever know who didn’t end up a bag lady. That’s supposed to be a secret. She said they wouldn’t publish my books anymore if they knew. But she’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Julie?” I said. “Yes, Julie’s dead.”
“She made me grow my hair. Even when they had those hairdos, back in the sixties, like Mia Farrow. She always made me wear it long. To cover up this.” She flipped her hair back over the scar. “I like this. I was eighteen when I got it. I was pretty.”
“I’m sure you were.” Phoebe wouldn’t be there. Phoebe would be at a meeting and then at dinner.
“No, you’re not,” Lydia said. “I look like shit. I’m fifty-five and I look a hundred and six and I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn I was a whore, either. I don’t mind.”
She sucked the rest of her beer out of the bottle and stood it on its head on the table.
“You know what?” she said. “I wasn’t ever really pretty. Not like the girls who write for the category lines. Nice little girls from nice little houses on Main Street, every last one of them looking for the perfect man and the perfect wrinkle cream.”
“Janine,” I said. “We’ll call Janine.”
Lydia made a face. “The woman in the gray flannel suit. Gregory Peck was better-looking.”
“Gregory Peck isn’t waiting back at the hotel to get you your dinner.”
Lydia shrugged. “Someday I’m going to go out and buy a shirtwaist dress,” she said. “Little flower print, little belt, Peter Pan collar. Look like all the rest of you.”
“Order another beer,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I left another five on the table and hurried toward the back, past the single, slightly open door that said “Rest Room” to a small space by the kitchen where I knew there would be a pay phone. It was there and working, the fretful hum of the dial tone coming strong and sure. I dug out a dime and dialed the Cathay-Pierce.
“Could you page Miss Janine Williams?” I asked, when somebody finally answered the
phone. “Try 1406.”
“One moment please.”
“Pay? Pay McKenna?”
I looked up and saw Lydia weaving and bobbing toward me, her hair loose, her shoulders slack, her legs buckling. She put out an arm to steady herself against the wall, inching toward me as if she was swimming through molasses.
“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone,” she said. “Wanted to make absolutely sure.”
“I haven’t gone.”
“Couldn’t have you leave,” Lydia said. “Not now. Not a good time to leave.”
She gave me a smile that showed every one of her teeth and most of her gums and passed out at my feet.
CHAPTER 18
I POURED A GLASS of water over her face, managing to wake her long enough to get her to her feet, through the main room of the bar, out to Broadway and into a cab. Her hair was wet when we hit the street, and I thought the cold bite of the strong wind would shock her awake. I was wrong. I had hardly given instructions to the cabbie when she closed her eyes and fell asleep again, her makeup running into thick lines of red and black and brown, making her face look like a Girl Scout’s plaster of pans topographical map. I lit a cigarette and stared out the window in search of a clock. We’d found that cab too easily. It had to be late.
He pulled up to the Fifty-eighth Street side entrance to the Cathay-Pierce, and I paid him, opened the door closest to the curb, got out the street side and came around. Lydia lay across the seat, leaden and large, one false eyelash drooping down her cheek and a smile like a curlicue across her lips. I started to pull her by the legs into the narrow snow-covered ridge at the edge of the sidewalk.
“For God’s sake,” someone said. “There you are. Where have you been?”
“What’s the matter, lady?” the driver said. “You want me to sit around at the curb for the next six months? You want that, I’m going to put the meter back on.”
I looked up into the face of Nick Carras, high-cheekboned and clear. I didn’t stop to wonder what he was doing there.
“I need some help,” I told him. “She’s out, deadweight, incapacitated. You still interested in being my lawyer?”
“Why?”
“Because this comes under the heading of privileged information.”
“Privileged communications.” He leaned down and picked Lydia off the seat, holding her in his arms like a parody of the old Boys’ Town poster. I gave a ten-second tribute to the way he looked in his jeans and slammed the cab door shut.
“Is there some way we could sneak her upstairs?” I asked. “A back elevator. If we could call her doctor—”
“She doesn’t need a doctor. She’s asleep.” He held her out to me. “Listen. Even, regular breathing, reasonably deep.”
“Also beer, cocaine, and God knows what else,” I said. “As well as Time, Newsweek, and half the staff of the ‘CBS Evening News.’ If they see her like this, it’ll be everywhere.”
“Will it matter?”
“Romance readers tend to be little ladies in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. They do not take kindly to overdoses of white powders ingested in Forty-second Street bars.”
“Okay,” he said. He carried her to the revolving door, wedged them both into a single quarter, and waited inside until I came through. “I’ll get her upstairs for you,” he said, leading me through the deserted back hall behind the lobby, “but I don’t think you’re going to be able to keep it absolutely quiet. You’re going to have to tell Martinez, anyway.”
He stabbed the elevator button and looked as surprised as I felt when the door slid open. We stepped inside.
“Fourteen,” I told him. “What does Martinez want?”
“That’s why I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “By order of one Phoebe Weiss, now Damereaux, I am supposed to find you, find out where you’ve been, and find a way to convince Martinez you’re telling the truth.” The door slid open on eight, revealing nothing. “Thank God,” Nick said. “I figure we’re all right unless somebody sees us.”
The door opened on fourteen. I held it for him until he got Lydia out and down the hall. I followed, rummaging her handbag for keys. I found four prescription bottles of Quaaludes, one prescription bottle of phenobarbital, a tin of cocaine, a package of No Doz, half an ounce of marijuana, and a silver hip flask full of gin.
“Here we are,” I said. I jiggled the hotel key in the lock and managed to swing the door open. “My God,” I said, “what’s she been doing in here?”
Nick stepped inside and blinked in confusion at the piles of underwear, papers, cigarette packages, romance novels, candy wrappers, and movie magazines that littered the floor.
“The maid comes in once a day,” he said. “How can she do this in one day?”
“How am I supposed to know? Take her into the bedroom and I’ll get Janine to get her doctor.”
He put her down on the couch instead.
“You can’t get Janine,” he said. “She’s downstairs talking to the police.”
I stopped where I was and looked at him, feeling my stomach drop, feeling that numbness, which always covered me until the emergency was over, begin to fall away.
“Janine is talking to the police,” I said. “Why?”
He sat down on the floor, his back against the couch where Lydia lay, and stretched out his legs. He looked more than ever like a Bennington freshman’s concept of a Greek God. He sounded like the Voice of Death in an ancient morality play. Something was wrong and getting worse. I felt his growing pessimism as an accusation.
“I’m not exactly sure what’s happening myself,” he said. “After Phoebe and I finally escaped from Amelia, I went for a walk. I got back about half an hour ago. I walked through the door, the elevator opened on the other side of the lobby, and this guy ran out yelling somebody’s dead. We all went running to the fifth floor. Phoebe came from another direction. She took one look at this woman and said I had to find you. Where were you, anyway?”
“Times Square.” I motioned to Lydia on the couch. “I was taking a walk. I met Lydia and she was like that.”
“Just like that?” He gave Lydia a once-over. “Just like that, on the street?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Drunk or stoned or something. So I took her to a bar on Forty-second Street and bought her a beer. Where, as I told you, she decided to do just a little more cocaine.”
“And passed out.”
“Passed out or OD’d or went into a coma or worse.” I gave Lydia a nervous look. “I think we ought to call the hospital. I don’t know what she’s swallowed or snorted I didn’t see.”
“You been with her for the last forty-five minutes?”
“For the last forty-five minutes I’ve probably been getting her in and out of cabs.”
“What time did you leave the hotel?”
“You saw me leave the hotel,” I said. “You saw me leave Amelia’s, anyway. I went right out.”
“Anybody see you leave?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You and Phoebe. Amelia. What difference does it make?”
He closed his eyes and threw back his head, frowning slightly. “It could be totally unrelated,” he said. “But I don’t believe it.”
He took a brown paper bag out of the pocket of his down vest and tossed it to me. “Baklava,” he said. “Like this morning.”
I took a largish piece from the bottom layer of wax paper.
“Let’s get one thing clear,” he said. “You did not, I take it, call Phoebe at six-fifteen this evening and ask her to meet you at six-thirty on the fifth floor of this hotel.”
“Of course I didn’t,” I said. “I was—” I waved at Lydia, still inert on the couch.
“We knew somebody was probably setting you up,” he sighed. “Why should today be any different? You go walking down Sixth Avenue, a nice leisurely stroll to clear your head. Wonderful idea. Can’t prove any of it. While you’re out hacking around, somebody calls Phoebe, claims to be you, and tells her she’s got to be o
n the fifth floor at six-thirty. When she gets there, somebody has taken a knife to Leslie Ashe.”
“Leslie Ashe?” I said. “Myrra’s granddaughter Leslie Ashe?”
“She wasn’t anybody I recognized,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t recognize her if she were this Leslie Ashe.”
“I wouldn’t recognize Leslie Ashe. I’ve never set eyes on the woman.” I looked at Lydia, pale and dirty and tired. “I’d better call the doctor,” I said. “And maybe I should get in touch with Phoebe. Find out—”
I stopped, feeling the pressure building up behind my eyes, the control draining out of my muscles.
“Leslie Ashe,” I said. “For God’s sake. What’s happening?”
CHAPTER 19
VOICES IN A HALLWAY, hysterical and ragged, sharp and querulous and high. Two officers in uniform, standing against a doorjamb, arms folded across chests.
“Warm water and soap, that’ll get the blood out. Warm water and Ivory soap.”
“Club soda by itself, before it sets.”
“Can’t take the glass up in the vacuum. Tear the bag to pieces.”
“That’s the Farret suite,” I said, putting my hand on Nick’s arm. The gesture slowed him enough to give me time to look over the scene: the crowd of young women in pastels huddled inches from the police line, Mary Allard with her hands and back pressed against the far wall, Janine in tears on the floor in a pile of papers. As we drew closer, I could see the blood, a thin stream emerging from the darkness of the suite, beginning to congeal.