This was exasperating, but I was having a pretty good time myself. I asked her if she still wanted to catch a movie.
“Of course. We’re on a date.”
I asked what kind of film she fancied, hoping that Julie Andrews wouldn’t figure in the answer.
“Do you think Midnight Cowboy is still playing?” she asked.
“You haven’t seen it yet?”
“Six or seven times.”
“I guess when you like a movie you really like it,” I said.
“If it wasn’t for movies,” she said, “I think I’d die.”
I borrowed a newspaper from the bartender and checked the listings. Midnight Cowboy was playing uptown at the Hauptman, a theater I’d never heard of. Outside, the evening had become a good deal cooler and as we walked east Sandy cuddled up to me. It felt nice. When I stepped off the sidewalk to hail a cab, she said, “No. Let’s take the subway. I love the subway.” I didn’t argue. After all, the purpose behind this pretend date was to see if Sandy Smollett attracted any unwanted attention. That was much more likely to happen on the street or on a subway platform than inside a cab. We reached the Lexington Avenue IRT and rode uptown without incident, Sandy still clinging to my arm and pressing up against me.
The Hauptman was a tiny movie theater in Yorkville, next to a German grocery store with bratwurst and blutwurst and Limburger cheese and big loaves of pumpernickel bread and bottles of Spaten beer in the window. Sandy could name them all—and seemed to have tried them all.
“So you were in Germany too?”
She nodded, and I fancied I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes, but in a moment it was gone.
The theater looked like it had been built about the time Fritz Lang was making Metropolis. I imagined it playing The Blue Angel, and maybe during the heyday of the German American Bund, Triumph of the Will. I bought tickets from a little old lady in fluorescent-pink curlers, and we found ourselves in an almost empty auditorium with faded murals of castles on the Rhine just visible in the projector’s flickering light.
“Let’s sit in the back row,” said Sandy. “That’s what you’re supposed to do on a date.”
I went along with that. The movie had already started, but it didn’t seem to matter. In about ten seconds flat, Sandy was totally into the film, her eyes riveted to the screen like a child watching Snow White for the first time. At the point when Rizzo becomes ill she began to cry, and sobbed quietly till the conclusion of the film. As the end credits rolled and the lights came up, she just stared at the screen, tears still rolling down her cheeks.
“I have to sit through the credits,” she said, “because you never know when the name of somebody you went to school with will show up.”
I wanted to ask where that school had been, but instead I said, “Has that ever happened?”
She said, “No—but I’ve seen names that were very similar.”
The woman in the pink curlers appeared and began to sweep up spilled popcorn and cigarette butts. We stepped out into the night. Nobody opened fire with an assault weapon or attacked with a hatchet.
“Now we go dancing,” said Sandy.
My response must have lacked enthusiasm.
“Is this a date or not?” she demanded. “If it’s a date, that’s what we have to do.”
I was beginning to get freaked again, but I played along.
“What kind of dancing? Jazz? Rock? Salsa?”
“Cheek-to-cheek. Somewhere smoochy.”
I told myself that this was all part of the job, managing to overlook the fact that there was none. I racked my brains to think of someplace that would fit the bill. Not easy in the era of The Electric Circus and Fillmore East. Then it hit me. Not far from where we were, on Lexington Avenue, was a neighborhood bar with a glass brick facade. I’d been in there once when it was held up by a couple of kids in Halloween masks. I couldn’t remember the name of the place, but recalled that on Fridays and Saturdays it had dancing to a piano-bass-guitar trio—standards doled out à la Nat King Cole. This wasn’t a weekend, but unless things had changed there was a jukebox in there with tracks by Sinatra, and Ella, and Tony Bennett, and smoothies like that. It was worth a try.
The place was called the Bunny Hutch. There was a neon bunny over the door, assorted porcelain bunnies behind the bar, and framed cartoons of copulating and urinating bunnies on the walls. Despite this artfully themed décor, business wasn’t booming. A couple of middle-aged guys in warm-up jackets were drinking at the bar. Two morose older couples ate something that resembled schnitzel and drank pale beer in a booth upholstered in faded turquoise Naugahyde while squabbling in some Central European language. That was it, except for a sallow-faced woman who both worked the bar and served tables. But the jukebox was there with its Coupe de Ville styling, and there was a Kleenex-sized dance floor.
Sandy pronounced it perfect—just like home. I told her it was as close to Nowhere as we could manage in Manhattan.
We ordered drinks and the barmaid asked to see Sandy’s ID. She flashed a driver’s license in a way that kept me from catching where it had been issued, but I could see it wasn’t New York. We took our drinks over to the jukebox and Sandy called up some tracks. The first was Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t it Romantic”—a version by Peggy Lee. I wondered if that was a statement of intent. At first, Sandy just gazed into the jukebox’s fluorescent interior and danced with the changing patterns of light for a partner, shifting her weight in time with the music, letting her hips and shoulders do the talking. She wasn’t just Sandy anymore, but Sandra Dee and every American teenager who had ever put on saddle shoes and bobby socks.
“How old did you say you were?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I’m twenty-four.”
“And this girl-next-door look—what’s that about?”
“Is that what you call it?”
“What else would you call it?”
“I don’t know. Is it important?”
“It just doesn’t fit with the miserable pittance I know about your life,” I said.
“You know even less than you think,” she told me.
“Why are you teasing me?” I asked.
“Are you calling me a tease?” she said flirtatiously. “Where I come from, that’s fighting talk.”
We danced, though it was hardly Fred and Ginger. Our moves were more a matter of rocking to and fro and shuffling a couple of steps this way and that—but all with Sandy pressed up against me. I’m as professional as the next PI, but I won’t pretend I even tried to keep the billy goat in the stable.
“You’re right,” she whispered. “I wasn’t always the girl next door—but I always wanted to be.”
She pressed even harder against me, then suddenly pulled away.
“This is scary,” she said. “I don’t want to put a target on your back. We’d better get out of here.”
We took a taxi downtown, Sandy clutching my hand all the way and looking very tense. I asked the cabbie to drop us by St. Vincent’s and we walked west on 12th Street, still holding hands, but I had the feeling I had been demoted to the status of security blanket. As we stepped off the sidewalk to cross the roadway near West 4th, a battered Firebird pulled out of a nearby parking space, tires squealing. For a moment the car seemed to be lurching directly at us. As I dragged Sandy back toward the sidewalk, I got a glimpse of Jersey plates and a kid in a Rastafarian knitted hat, his eyes popped wide open like he’d just taken a hit of whatever they give race horses to make them run faster.
“Get out of my town, honkeys,” he screamed through the open window, skidding and careening toward 6th Avenue.
“Was he trying to kill is?” asked Sandy.
“Just a stoner,” I tried to assure her, though there was no way of knowing.
As we reached Abingdon Square I saw two police cruisers outside my apartme
nt, their emergency lights flashing. Sandy looked at me, frightened, and I did my impersonation of a man who has everything under control, telling myself that this might be someone else’s headache—Ricky from upstairs, who had a habit of getting beaten up, or Mrs. Lukis next door, who suffered from delusions about hippie anarchists hiding in her basement.
“Any reason the cops might be looking for you?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Sandy. “Anyhow, how would they know I’m staying with you?”
Plenty of people seemed to, but I let that go.
“So we better check out what’s happening,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to opt out? If they’re looking for me, it might mean trouble.”
“I’ll stick with you. I don’t want to be on my own.”
We walked past the playground and the little park and I presented myself to a uniformed cop standing alongside one of the cars.
“You the guy on the parlor floor?” he asked. “Someone tried to break in.”
I led Sandy inside, where we found two plainclothes men, one black and one white. I knew the white one, Detective Campbell, who was a decent enough guy as heat goes. He had on a Sinatra-style fedora and a raincoat and he was sucking on his trademark pipe.
“Figured it was you, Novalis,” he said, “on account of that picture of you over the fireplace—the one where you’re looking debonair in cuffs outside night court on Centre Street.”
“I’m sentimental,” I told him.
“I noticed that photo when I was cleaning,” said Sandy. “I wondered what that was about.”
“So what’s the story?” I asked.
“Just doing our job,” said Campbell. “You know anyone who might want to harm you?’
“Me? You’ve got to be joking. I don’t have an enemy in the world. Anyway, the officer outside said it was an attempted break-in.”
“That’s about right, as far as it goes,” said Campbell, leading me toward the kitchen. A door that gave onto a little concrete deck overlooking the garden was open. It had been opened by the cops, but Campbell pointed to marks on the door and door frame that showed someone had tried to force it with something like a crowbar.
“A dishwasher at the restaurant on Hudson saw him through the kitchen window and raised the alarm. He thought the guy was holding something that could have been a gun. He yelled at him and the guy took off, though we haven’t figured out how he got access from the street in the first place.”
“Any description?”
“Denim jacket, long, light-colored hair, maybe a ponytail. That’s about it.”
That was interesting. The guy from the White Horse?
“So,” I said, not wanting to put more of a scare into Sandy, “a simple case of a botched burglary?”
“Maybe,” said Campbell. “Maybe not. ”
“Because a guy who fits that general description was sitting on the stoop earlier this evening.”
“Anyone you recognized?”
“I’d seen him a few minutes earlier, on the terrace of the White Horse. Never saw him before that.”
Campbell shrugged. Sandy looked nervous.
The usual rigmarole of making statements followed. I told Campbell’s partner where we had been that evening, and explained that Sandy had slept over the night before.
“On the sofa,” she added.
The cop said it looked like a very comfortable sofa. He addressed a few questions to her, then told her she was free to leave. Sandy said she planned to stay. We spent another half hour waiting for the fuzz to finish. Before they left, I asked Campbell what unit he was working out of these days. He told me he was assigned to the Special Affairs Bureau, a euphemistic moniker for an outfit used to investigate incidents with the potential to embarrass someone in the establishment, or the Department. Garden variety break-ins do not normally come under its purview.
“So what brings Special Affairs dicks to my door?” I asked.
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said.
“Are we safe here?” Sandy asked, when they had gone.
I told her I hoped so, adding, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be back tonight after the cops turned the place over.”
“Is someone out to hurt you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “In my business, you make enemies.”
“Is there anyone who might be upset about something right now?”
“Only Janice.”
That raised a smile.
“Seriously. Are you working on a case where somebody wants to get even with you? Or was that somebody after me?”
“The subway stalker?”
“He fits your description.”
“I don’t know.”
“It was probably just a botched break-in.”
“What about the gun?”
“Maybe a gun. What the guy in the kitchens saw was probably the crowbar used to force the door.”
“You’re hiding something,” said Sandy.
It struck me that there might be some value in letting her believe that.
“You say you can’t tell me about your past,” I told her. “I can’t tell you about my investigations.”
“So,” she said, suddenly smiling and eloquent, “your world has to stay secret from me, and mine has to stay secret from you—and yet here we are together, two people who seem to like each other a bit. It’s kind of sexy, isn’t it? You don’t have to answer that, because I already know how you feel. When we were dancing, you had a hard-on. Don’t pretend you didn’t because I could feel it. I hope I’m not being too forward?”
She bit her lip.
“It certainly is putting it on the line,” I said.
“Well, I had a hard-on for you too,” she said.
“A hard-on for me? Is that how nice girls talk where you come from?”
“Not the nice girls, no, but back then I wasn’t one of the nice girls. I’m still learning to be one. Sometimes I slip up.”
Okay. I thought about the warnings I’d been given to treat Sandy with kid gloves. I told myself to cool it, then went to the kitchen. I felt in the back of the top drawer, hoping that Campbell and his pal hadn’t cleaned me out. To my relief, I found my stash and a package of Zig-Zag papers.
“What are you doing?” Sandy called out. “I’m lonely.”
“I’m rolling a joint,” I said.
“Not now,” she said. “I need you here.”
I finished rolling the joint, lit it, and brought it to the living area. I discovered, with mixed feelings, that Sandy had removed her dress and was standing there in her underwear.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Just because. Yes—I do find you very sexy, but this is not the right time. There are bad things happening out there.”
“But we’re in here. Can’t we forget about all that? We’re on a date.”
“Sandy, we’re not on a date. We’re hanging out together for a reason—and I’ll grant you, we’ve been having a pretty nice time—but we’re here because those bad things are happening and we’re trying to figure out why.”
I thought some more about those warnings from Yari and from J.H. Lucking, but she looked as if she might burst into tears. She bit her lip in earnest, so that it bled. What could I do? I stashed the joint, put my arms around her, and tried to comfort her.
“Well, at least I should get a proper kiss on our first date,” she said.
Perhaps she was trying to entrap me and send me to my doom, but would one kiss make any difference? I intended a brief nibble, but it didn’t pan out that way. Maybe it was the taste of blood from her punctured lip.
“I’m getting another hard-on,” Sandy said. She took hold of my wrist and placed my hand on her crotch so that m
y middle finger rested on the crevice of her labia through the fabric of her underwear. The hard-on was metaphorical, but everything else was definitely for real.
“Do you feel it?” she asked.
I told her I felt it, and struggled to regain my resolve.
“Good—because that’s all for tonight,” she said. She allowed my hand to remain where it was for another second or two, then gently removed it. The tantalizing and lascivious smile that had settled on her face did not jibe with the persona of a woman who’d seen The Sound of Music twenty-seven times.
I was getting to know a lot of different Sandy Smolletts. Too many.
NINE
Sandy slept in the bed and I slept on the sofa, or at least I tried. Sometimes when you’re half awake—and maybe a little stoned—your mind seems crystal clear and you zoom in on a single idea that takes on an overwhelming significance. It’s like gazing into a souvenir snow globe after all the snow has settled and finally the Empire State Building stands serene and magnificent among the drifts. As I lay there, eyes closed, my legs cramping because the sofa was three inches too short, the idea that came into focus was that a visit to Sandy’s Lincoln Center sublet was imperative.
When, after about four hours’ sleep, I suggested that to her, she gave me a look that was both angry and scared.
“What’s the point? What would you find there? I took most of my belongings to Jilly’s, and the rest are at the Alibi—where they’ll be expecting me in a few hours.”
Her reaction made me all the more determined.
“Call in sick,” I told her.
“That’s not the way I operate,” she said.
I let it drop for the moment and concentrated on the idea of paying a visit to the sublet, though I had no idea what I would be looking for when I got there. Then again, I had no idea what I was looking for, period.
Sandy agreed to the plan under protest. I was out of coffee, so while she got dressed I went to La Bonbonnière to pick up breakfast and to use the pay phone there to call Yari Mendelssohn’s number. I didn’t expect him to be there, since I knew he must still be in Haiti, but I was interested in finding out if there was some way of getting hold of him. I wasn’t even sure quite what I wanted to ask him, but that hunch I’d been cultivating told me that he knew more about Sandy than he had been letting on. I could have called from home, but I didn’t want her to know I was trying to reach him.
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