Yari had a live-in housekeeper who told me politely, in a lilting Caribbean accent, that Yari was out of town. I asked if there was a number where he could be reached. She said, “Lord, no—he’s in a godforsaken place with no telephones.” I asked when he would be back. She told me she didn’t know exactly and that I should contact his studio, though she didn’t think anybody was there. No one was.
I took coffee and sandwiches back to the apartment. Sandy visibly cheered up when she unwrapped a kaiser roll dripping with egg yolk and with tongues of crispy bacon protruding from the bun as if they wanted to lick her all over—an ambition I shared.
“You read my mind,” she said.
She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with sneakers—still the girl next door, but in a way that would permit her to blend in with New York a little more readily. When we finished eating, I said, “Okay, let’s get this over with.”
She was still fighting the idea.
“Do we really have to go? I could give you the key and tell you how to get in.”
I was beginning to wonder if there was some reason she didn’t want me to see the place.
“I’m not expecting to find anything,” I bullshitted, “but when you’re investigating something you have to check out every possibility, and you should be with me.”
“Don’t you have something else you should be doing?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be working on a case or something?”
“Right now,” I said, “you have my whole attention.”
Her mood this morning was utterly different from the night before. She appeared preoccupied, and at times her mind seemed to be a thousand miles away—in Paris, maybe, or wherever it was that Nowhere was. When we left the house, however, she was jolted back to the here and now.
I was on the lookout for possible trouble, but didn’t pay much attention to the man walking a dog who was approaching from the direction of the river. He was a wiry character with a big handlebar moustache, wearing aviator glasses with mirrored lenses, and dressed in a bondage biker outfit—tight black leather shirt and britches, black leather cap, biker boots, a black leather belt with loops for fake bullets, and wristbands with rows of studs. In other neighborhoods he might have stood out; in mine he was just another neighbor walking his pooch, a Doberman smartly got up in a studded collar that matched the wristbands.
As they drew alongside the stoop, Sandy stepped onto the sidewalk and the dog lunged at her, teeth bared. She backed up against the railings. The bondage biker tightened up on the leash so that the animal couldn’t reach Sandy. Not quite. I confronted him—without getting too close, because I didn’t fancy tooth marks on my ass—screaming something original about keeping his fucking animal under control. He sneered and said, “I guess Warlock doesn’t like your girlfriend.” We exchanged a few more pleasantries, then I noticed that Sandy was crouched on the sidewalk scratching the belly of the Doberman, which had rolled over and was whimpering with pleasure. With a few well-chosen curses, the deflated biker dragged Warlock away.
“I grew up with big dogs,” Sandy said, very matter-of-fact.
“I’m not saying he wanted to hurt you,” I said, “but that guy for sure wanted to scare you.”
Sandy shrugged.
“No big deal,” she said. “You’re reading too much into the whole thing.”
We took an express train to Columbus Circle. When we emerged onto Broadway, Sandy said once more, “Do we really have to go up there? The place gives me the creeps.”
I ignored her.
The sublet was across from Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. I asked Sandy how she had found the place.
“I’m renting it from one of the girls at the Alibi. I never met her. Her name’s Wanda Lee—an Asian girl—Asian-American. She’s touring over there now—Hong Kong or somewhere. That’s why the apartment was available. Strippers do a lot of these tours. Audiences want to see fresh faces. Well, I guess not only faces. A lot of girls go to Asia these days—I don’t know where, because I haven’t been—places where the boys fighting in Vietnam go for R-and-R. But it’s tough over there, because the local girls work for less money and they’ll do stuff American girls would never dream of.”
“You mean like the nice girls from the Alibi?”
That annoyed Sandy.
“Have you ever met any of them?”
“Only you—and I kind of figured you weren’t typical.”
“Well, you shouldn’t say nasty things about people you don’t know.”
I backed off.
“So tell me about the apartment,” I said. “She had it posted on a notice board or something?”
“No—it was all arranged before I arrived in New York. A woman at the Alibi set it up—the lady who looks after the girls—Shirley Squilacci.”
We arrived outside the building. It was a well-maintained older structure a dozen stories high with a modest entrance and no doorman but an elaborate security system that required two keys and a punched-in code to gain entry. It made me wonder how a stranger had managed to get into the building, let alone into the sublet, while Sandy was sleeping there. Maybe a resident of the building.
Sandy let us in, fumbling with the keys.
“You picked up the keys from this Shirley woman?” I asked.
“Shirley’s very nice. She knew I was new to the city and she brought me over and showed me where everything was.”
“She knew her way around the place?”
“I think she knows Wanda pretty well.”
“More than just friends?”
Sandy shrugged.
“It’s not unusual around places like the Alibi,” she said.
“Not your scene?” I asked.
She nodded, which could have meant yes or no.
The elevator arrived and we rode to the fourth floor. Sandy unlocked another door, which gave access to an apartment that faced onto an alley at the rear of the building.
“I don’t want to go in,” she said.
“We’re here now,” I told her.
“Too many bad memories,” she said. “Bad vibes. You look around if you like. I’ll wait out here.”
I stepped into a living room that was furnished like a cross between a motel on the outskirts of Newark Airport and a fortune teller’s parlor in Chinatown. The basic items—a sofa, an easy chair, a sideboard, a small table, a couple of upright chairs—were strictly boondocks bargain basement. There was a big console TV, though, and some bread had been laid out for bamboo-patterned drapes, there was a half-decent Chinese rug on the floor, and the place was packed with Asian tchotchkes—vases, figurines of courtesans en déshabillé and old men with fishing rods, a carved ivory pagoda, a bowl decorated with dragons and butterflies, a lacquered folding screen, a doll in some kind of traditional costume. On the walls were framed reproductions of Chinese landscape paintings, and draped over the sofa were lengths of fabric decorated with stylized blossoms and leaves. It was hard to picture Sandy Smollett living in that room.
The door to what I presumed was the bedroom was closed, which seemed odd. People seldom close a door when they go from one room to another, unless some issue of privacy is involved. I took out a pair of the cotton gloves I carry with me when I’m on a gig and pulled them on before grasping the handle and slowly opening the door.
It wasn’t pretty. A man was hanging by a length of nylon rope from a light fixture. A chinoiserie chair that he’d kicked out from under him was overturned on the floor a few feet away. His face was contorted and his tongue was swollen and protruding. He was a youngish white male, tall and of average build, with longish dirty-blond hair worn in a ponytail. Rigor mortis had set in, but there were no outward signs of decomposition. The faint odor suggesting the onset of internal decay might have existed only in my imagination. The corpse was naked except for a New York Knicks T-shirt and a pair of
athletic socks. The man’s penis was frozen in a parody of priapic zeal and had turned a particularly nasty shade of puce.
I recognized him despite the twisted features. It was the guy who had been staring at me on the terrace of The White Horse the previous evening, and who had been sitting on my stoop a few minutes later. Possibly it was the same person who had tried to break into my apartment, and it was plausibly the man who had sneaked into Sandy’s sublet days earlier while she was sleeping.
My first concern was to make sure that she did not walk in on this macabre sight. I hurried back to the corridor, but Sandy was nowhere to be seen. In a way this was a relief, but it also set off all kinds of alarms in my head. Why had she left? Had she come into the apartment and seen the dangling man over my shoulder? That didn’t seem likely—surely she would have screamed or given away her presence somehow? Or was there any possibility she could have known what I would find in there? It would explain her reluctance to visit the apartment, but it seemed extremely unlikely. This man was not long dead. Sandy must have been with me when he died, though it was just remotely possible that she could have received a phone call—possibly even from the suicide victim himself—while I was at La Bonbonnière.
There was a stronger chance that she had seen something—or sensed something—and had gone to raise the alarm, though I could not imagine why she would have done that without telling me. It was possible too that she had taken off as soon as I entered the apartment because she was afraid that I would find something that she did not want me to see, not necessarily something to do with a dead man. Whatever the case, I had to move quickly. Trying not to retch, I hurried back into the bedroom to do a quick reconnoiter. I had spotted that there was a photograph on the carpet near the dead man, its face turned to the floor. When I picked it up, I saw it was a print of Yari’s Vamp picture of Sandy Smollett—sprawled in that leather chair, revealing enough flesh to provoke arousal—presumably the one Yari had sent her. Then I noticed, half hidden by the toppled chair, a pair of flesh-colored panties. When I checked them, I saw they were stained with what appeared to be semen. A nearby underwear drawer was open. I wasted a couple of seconds hoping that the panties belonged to Wanda Lee.
There was a pair of jeans and a denim jacket on the bed, and I quickly searched them, without luck, for a wallet or some form of ID. There was no time to check out anything more, but I did spot that the room’s only window was an inch or so ajar. There was a fire escape directly outside.
I left in a hurry without disturbing anything, checked that there was no one in the corridor, then made for the emergency stairs. I reached the street without encountering a soul. My first thought was to get as far away from there as possible, but then I changed my mind and walked as casually as I could manage to a little sandwich shop on a corner half a block away. I ordered a coffee and sat at a table by the window. If Sandy Smollett had raised the alarm, the apartment building would soon be crawling with heat. I heard a police siren, but the Doppler shift told me that the vehicle was headed uptown on Broadway.
I sat there for perhaps fifteen minutes, using the time to think about why Sandy Smollett had run out on me, and where she might have gone. There were any number of possible answers to both those questions, but my hunch—now spreading in all directions like a metastasizing cancer—led me to suspect that she might well have taken refuge at Stewart Langham’s studio, which was just a few blocks away. The sandwich shop had a phone, so I called information for Langham’s number. It was unlisted. I tried Jilly’s to see if I could get his number from her. No reply. I walked to Langham’s building and asked the doorman if a young lady had been there within the past half hour, looking for Mr. Langham. He said it was the building’s policy not to divulge information about residents or their visitors. I showed him my PI card and a twenty-dollar bill. He showed me the door.
I walked the half block to Central Park, entered through the pedestrian gate at 69th Street, and sat on a bench near Tavern on the Green in the hope of clearing my lungs of the stench of death. I suppose the trees were beginning to take on those kitschy fall colors, but I was preoccupied with thoughts of the dangling man. I didn’t want to drop Sandy in the shit, but it seemed indecent to let him just hang there with the flies buzzing around his balls, and common sense told me that someone was going to report the stiff sooner or later. I was glad I didn’t know for sure where Sandy was, but I was concerned that if I made an anonymous call to the cops they would be all over Aladdin’s Alibi like Thousand Island dressing on a Reuben sandwich.
I hoped that by now Sandy would have seen the light about not showing up for work, but with her it was impossible to be certain about anything. In any case, why was I in such a hurry to report the schmuck’s suicide? What was it to me? He’d already messed up my day. And suppose someone had seen me leaving the building? Thank God I’d been careful about fingerprints, because the cops had mine on file—which reminded me that I still had the cotton gloves balled up in my pocket. I tossed them into a garbage can and headed for 5th Avenue.
TEN
I hiked down to the Donnell Library on 53rd Street. That’s where the New York Public Library used to keep the original Winnie-the-Pooh dolls, safe behind bulletproof glass in case drug-crazed Yippies attempted to liberate them by armed force or some sex-starved and homesick tourist from Nebraska attempted to sodomize Eeyore. I wasn’t there to lose myself in the Hundred Acre Wood, but because the Donnell had a decent selection of art books and catalogues, as befitted its location across the street from the Museum of Modern Art.
I found several devoted to Stewart Langham and spent some time skimming through the biographical sections. This provided me with a few snippets. He had been born and raised in Seymour, Connecticut, the youngest of the five children of a wealthy mill owner known locally as the Copper Wire King of the Naugatuck Valley. Stew graduated from Yale, then, at the tail end of World War I, served in the Ambulance Corps. While on leave in Paris, he did the chestnuts-in-blossom bit, saw the work of Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, and the rest of the gang, and set his mind on becoming a painter. Luckily for him, he had some chops. After a year at the Académie Julian, he returned to the Land of the Free and renewed his studies at the Art Students League on 57th Street, just as he had told me. Then he launched his career, quickly attracting attention with his incident-filled street scenes and depictions of voluptuous nudes in demotic settings.
There had been an early and brief marriage to a fellow student named Beatrice Armand, with whom he had had a son, Ambrose, who died in childhood. Cynthia the ball breaker didn’t enter the picture until 1936 when Stew was in his forties. Somewhere along the way they produced a daughter. They were divorced in Reno in 1944, but remarried in 1951 and seemingly lived together until her death ten years later. Photographs showed her to have been, in her prime, a statuesque blonde who, had it not been for the accidents of birth, might have made the grade as a showgirl.
Inside one book was a newspaper clipping with a photograph of Langham wearing a tux, his arm around the waist of a buxom bimbo named Lotte. Behind them, grinning, was a man identified as attorney Louis Mendelssohn. The clipping was attached to a page containing a paragraph that read, in part, “In 1963 Langham was called to testify before a grand jury investigating the gangland-style slaying of his friend Louis Mendelssohn, a well-to-do attorney and a prominent collector of the artist’s work.”
That was worth knowing, but I didn’t find much else that added anything useful to the Langham profile.
I had intended to go to my office, but as the train rattled into the 14th Street station, exhaustion hit. I gave into it and headed home to get some shut-eye. Once inside the apartment, my mind started racing again. Too much stimulus. Sandy’s pink overnight case was still there, the gingham dress from our “date” was draped over the back of a chair, and her stuff was still in the bathroom. I picked the cotton panties she had worn the previous evening off the floor, remembering the wa
y she had placed my hand on her crotch. Then I recalled the semen-stained panties I had found near the cadaver in the sublet and almost threw up. My head was spinning, but I poured myself a large Scotch and downed it, with another one for a chaser. Finally I kicked off my shoes and pants and climbed into bed. The sheets and the pillow smelled of girl—no other word for it—and the scent aroused me instantly, but before I had a chance to do anything about it I was swamped with sleep.
I was woken by the phone. It was Sandy. I wanted to yell at her, but couldn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I demanded, rather politely.
“Never mind that,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay. I was scared shitless something had happened to you. Why did you run out on me?”
“I had to get out of there. I saw you disappear into that place and I just bolted.”
I glanced at my watch and realized that I’d slept for more than two hours.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Are you at Langham’s?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re not at the Alibi, are you?”
“I’m not going to the Alibi. I’ve talked to them. I need some time to think.”
Her tone told me that she did not know about the man hanging in her apartment.
“We need to talk,” I said, trying to come up with the best way to break the news.
“Later,” she said. “I just wanted to check in on you.”
The Girl From Nowhere Page 8