by Delia Rosen
Who was that girl and where did she go? I wondered. When did she go? It wasn’t a precise time and place and I couldn’t even trace the process. All I knew is that she seemed like someone else. What I couldn’t figure out was whether I was wiser now or simply beaten down and jaded. I did know that I was more hamisch now—down-to-earth, a real person.
“They were both you,” I murmured. “Only now I’m the tree without the trimmings.”
The phalanxes of bells rang the hour. That was a signal to come back to the present. I did. Sitting here, doing nothing at all, life didn’t seem so bad. I was earning enough money, I was my own boss, and—okay—there was some tsuris with the house. And the “fella” situation could be better. But lots of people had those problems and worse. Like the fact that “More Coffee” was still playing in my head even though the iPod was in the car.
I checked e-mails—there were zero—so rather than feel like a loser and put my phone away, I looked up the gal who performed the song.
Ximene Gonzalez Gallego, born 1989, a winner on the Spanish talent TV show Operación Éxito in 2009, released an album that same year which was a moderate hit, another album in 2011 which got some attention here, and then wham—“Más café.” Romantically linked to Flamenco guitarist Juanito Mantilla, to Basque singer Nino Laboa, to fiery young Berliner Philharmoniker conductor Kurt Furtwangler, and presently—
Oh ho.
I stopped. That was interesting. She was currently dating Chimanga Strong, the president of the Southern Free International Bank. According to the entry, Strong was also the founder and financier behind Cotton Saint Tunes.
“So Fly Saucer has a bankro daddy,” I muttered.
That in itself wasn’t so strange as the fact that Fly Saucer didn’t seem to make a big deal out of having a big record. I wondered if even Luke knew that it was his. Maybe it happened so often for Fly it wasn’t anything special.
Dammit.
There was only one person who would be able to help unravel whatever had happened, and that was the cop who was already trying to figure the whole thing out.
“Don’t even think about that,” I told myself. “The day is too sweet for compromise.”
Though I did wonder—because I’m like a dog with a bone; I can’t leave things be, even when they’re bad for me—what would I do if he happened to walk by? Coincidences like that did occur. Would I want him to sit with me as just someone I know or the cop on the case—or would I want him to walk on? If I could pick and choose how he was going to integrate with my life, he could sit down. If not, he could stroll on by. Not that I expected him to stop. He had to have seen the police report about the assault outside my house. He hadn’t even texted to see how I was.
I ate my delightfully greasy wrap and dripped some kind of barbecue sauce on the grass. I sat on my suddenly unmotivated tuchas. I smiled at the cute park ranger who ambled by. He looked impassively back at me, which made me feel old and ugly and I suddenly hated him and whatever bimbo belle he was dating. I tried to change the mental subject and think about where I wanted to be a year from now.
Yes, things are okay. But I knew that I did not want to be back in this park next fall, by myself, wondering where I wanted to be a year from then . . .
Chapter 20
I had a little bit of an epiphany while I was lying in the park.
I was thinking about my mother and how much she would have liked the trees and the occasional twittering birds. She was always too busy and too concerned about me to worry about herself. I realized that my life down here was pure Mom. I worked, I looked after my staff, I did my little part in these various homicide investigations, all so I wouldn’t have to do what I’d just done: reflect on my own life. Not that there was anything wrong with helping others. But if you put yourself on the sidelines, pretty soon there was no time left to do anything about your own life.
I honestly didn’t know how to change that. I didn’t know if I could change it. I remember my mother saying how her mother was always taking on too much, especially things that were none of her business. Maybe it was in my DNA. But I decided, then, to try and give myself perspective instead of being swept along with the current. I’d keep a journal, and resolved to write down something new I’d learned every day—even if it was something small, like, “Mature shade trees actually have a personality” or “pulled pork causes acid reflux and makes me grepts.” One way or the other, the same time next year would be different.
It was late afternoon when I finally picked myself up and took a walk through the city. It was early evening when I found myself on 3rd Avenue not far from Union Street. I decided to go over to The Oatmeal Stallion. I’d never been and I decided I wanted to see a place where Lippy had played. I wondered if the police even knew about the connection. Fly had said he’d screwed up here. I wondered how.
It was still early so there was no bruiser at the red velvet ropes, no one behind the black velvet ropes that marked the smoking area, and no problem getting in. Things didn’t really heat up in this part of town until the hours moved back into single digits.
The bar was a horseshoe with tables packed tightly on both sides. A floor for the jazz band was at the open part of the horseshoe. There were two small dance areas on either side of that. Even though the club was open, it felt closed. There were only a few customers—mostly tourists, it looked like—and the bartender was busier with his cell phone than he was preparing drinks. I don’t drink much, but when I do, I order something fruity like an apricot sour. It didn’t really taste like liquor, but just one made me very nominally, pleasantly light-headed.
I sat away from the door, near the stage. It was tomb quiet, surprisingly depressing. But it did enable me to hear some yelling from somewhere behind the stage.
“Trouble with the talent?” I asked the bartender.
“Nah, it’s the big boss,” said the young man, who had a treble and base clef cut in either side of his scalp. He said it without looking up from his text. “He likes to yell.”
“You mean, Fly? He seems so laid back.”
The kid snickered. “Not the Fly man. The big boss. Mr. S.”
“Oh. Is Ximene with him?” I joked.
The kid snickered. “She’s on tour in Asia.”
“Maybe that’s why the big boss is so cross,” I said. “Hey, can I ask you a question?” I didn’t want for him to answer. “Did you know Lippy Montgomery?”
He looked up for the first time. “Why? You CSI?”
“Nope. Just a friend who misses him, wanted to talk about him.”
“I didn’t really know him,” he said, and went back to texting.
“But you know he was killed.”
“DYD, I got that tweet,” he told me—or rather, told me off—then shambled away. Least sociable bartender ever; the kid didn’t seem interested in conversation—at least, not with an old lady. And, by the way, after puzzling over it for a while, it wasn’t until the next day, when I asked Luke, that I learned DYD meant “Drink Your Drink” with an implied ALMA—”And Leave Me Alone.”
The muffled shouting rose and fell, like the sounds of a trumpet with a wah-wah mute. After a few minutes, a man I assumed to be Chimanga Strong emerged. He wore a tailored gray suit that probably cost more than my car and he trailed Clive Christian No. 1, which costs about two grand a bottle. I recognized it from an insert in a women’s magazine. It was something you were supposed to treat your man to—which, even if I had one, I never would.
He didn’t look like a man who, on paper at least, had it all.
What surprised me was who followed him out. It was Grant.
He was in his off-duty clothes—jeans, a button-down white shirt, blue blazer—and was poking at his cell phone, looking down. He was nearly past me when he happened to look up. He was facing ahead. I was on his right as he passed. He saw me peripherally and turned, like a rubbernecker at a traffic accident. He kept moving forward a moment longer, then stopped. Once they found me, his eyes never
left me. He hesitated, then took a few steps toward me. His look was a strange mix of incredulous, glad, and hostile.
“Hey,” I said. I felt pretty neutral, maybe a little guarded; that was the least provocative word I could think of.
He looked around. First at the adjoining seats and bar, then at the room. “You here alone?”
“I was,” I said. That was the apricot sour answering. My brain didn’t want to extend the invite. Or did it? I was confused.
He dipped his forehead toward the stool beside me. “May I?”
“Only if you promise not to buy me a drink,” I said. “One’s my limit.”
“I know,” he said.
There it was—a trace of bitterness. Hopefully, he got it out of his system. Otherwise, this was going to be a very short reunion.
“You okay?” he asked. “I saw the police report.”
Before I could answer, the bartender wandered over. He was no longer texting, seemed ready to do his job. Grant ordered a light beer. “I’m all right,” I said. My ears heard my voice and I didn’t like how glum I sounded. I cleared my throat. “I spoke to a detective after the NPD decided I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.”
“I heard. Detective Egan’s very thorough—she even asked where I was that night.”
“Sorry.”
“No need. I told her I was at the movies.”
I didn’t press. I didn’t care if he went alone, with a fellow officer, or with Miss Tennessee.
“Anyway, Detective Egan scraped the boiler-room floor,” he went on. “Concrete is pretty absorptive and she said that room is hot. She’s convinced they’ll find some DNA. That’ll rule me out.”
“Will it rule anyone in?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “It’s good to have, see if it matches anyone on file. But you can’t subpoena samples without probable cause.”
God bless the ACLU, I thought insincerely. I was all for due process, but not for laws that protected the perps at the expense of the victims.
“So,” I said, “what are you doing here? If I may ask.”
“Following up on some forensics of my own,” he said with uncustomary reserve.
“Officially, but not,” I said, looking his wardrobe up and down.
“Yeah. Some people—you don’t want to come at them head-on.”
“Or they lawyer up.”
Grant just smiled a little as his beer arrived. I thought hard, pushing past the thin scrim of the drink. Something he found in the trumpet case brought him here. What and why? It had to be something too small for me to have noticed. I glanced at the bartender. Hair? Cigarette ash from outside? A spilled drink in some crusted-over corner of velvet, maybe one of the house specialties?
“So what do you make of your home invader?” Grant asked. “Something Sally worked up?”
“To become my savior?” I shrugged. “I suppose she could have rigged a door or window when she was inside. And she shops where they sell belladonna.”
“At that nutjob Spud’s place?” he laughed. “He’s got the drill down pat.”
“What do you mean?”
“We think he grows and stores his ‘misdemeanor drugs’ in a van. He knows what a team with a search warrant looks like and he moves the van to a spot off-property, where it can’t be searched.”
“Can’t you just get two search warrants? One for the building and one for the van?”
“We tried that,” Grant said. “Joint NPD and FBI investigation two years ago. He figured that out, too, from the jackets. He had his girlfriend spray the interior of the van with Agent White.”
“Who is that, a mole?”
Grant nearly spit a mouthful of beer. “Good one.”
“What was?”
He stared at me. “Agent White. You made it a person.”
I looked back at him, totally confused. “Isn’t it?”
“You’re serious,” he said. “No, Agent White is a powerful defoliant, one of the ‘rainbow herbicides’ used by our armed forces until the mid-1980s. It’s a deadlier form of Agent Orange. Spud got his hands on a drum of the stuff and keeps it to kill the pot. Legally, a dead plant is not evidence of intent to sell, which is the real crime. Just getting into the vehicle to get it out would have required HAZMAT equipment—PD and Bureau rules—which enters into a new area of legal wrangling. We would have to declare a state of emergency, close down several blocks of the city, put choppers in the air in case the suspect attempts to flee . . . just not worth it for a few pot plants.”
“Or belladonna or bamboo cyanide,” I said.
He was still looking at me. “You’ve been doing your homework.”
“I’ve been scrubbing my name clean. Again.”
He turned to his beer. “Your name was never really in danger. Not for that.”
There was bitter dig number two. The apricot sour gave him a pass. I looked at the dark wood of the bar. The lights were a hazy smear, reflecting my thoughts.
Grant took pity on me. “The officers didn’t find any indication of forced entry at your place. Did anyone—”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I truly am. I circled the wagons. I don’t know why. Well, actually, I do—but they were my wagons, my cowboys, and also my Indians.”
“Look, I was a little over-eager, I know that. I didn’t allow for the fact that maybe I’m not what you want.”
I snickered. “How many drinks did you see me take in the months we dated?”
“One. It was sherry.”
“Right. Do you think I’d be sitting here by myself if I knew what I wanted? Half of me wants to run back home—I mean home-home, New York—and the other half of me wants to take on every challenge that’s facing me here.”
Grant swallowed more beer. “I wish you the best of luck with that,” he said. “I do. Because some of what you think are challenges are—were—allies who happened to be in the line of fire.”
I hate it when pronouns are used to discuss proper nouns whose identities are perfectly well-known. I finished my drink and put a twenty on the counter. I wanted to say, “Some allies are like Lichtenstein—neutral and dull.” But I didn’t. I wanted to leave things somewhat sociable.
“I should be going,” I said. “I have a couple of messes to deal with.”
“Two questions before you go?” Grant said-asked.
I turned to him with a wary “go ahead” look on my face. I had no idea what subject he was about to broach.
“Did you pick at the lining inside Lippy’s case?” he asked.
I wasn’t happy with that, but it was better than a question about “us.” I asked him why he asked.
“Because we found slight scrape marks, like a knife or letter opener would make.”
“Did you?” I asked. Which was as good as a confession.
“Tampering with evidence is a felony,” he said. “But let’s pretend we’re not concerned with silly details. Did you find anything there?”
“I’ll answer that if you tell me what you found that brought you here,” I said.
He considered the offer. “A strand of facial hair.”
“Strong is clean shaven.”
“A lot of the musicians here aren’t,” Grant said. “He’s not happy about a criminal investigation that could have blowback on him. Your turn. What did you find?”
“Ink,” I replied. “A couple of lowercase letters might have been—a ‘p’ and a ‘p’ at least that is what I thought it looked like. I’m sure you saw them, too.”
“That’s all?” he pressed. “No letter that went along with that?”
“I would’ve told you if I had,” I said. “I want you to find whoever killed Lippy and Tippi.”
“Was there any reason in particular you looked there?” Grant asked.
“Tippi had mentioned that her brother had some kind of treasure. I thought she meant a map and that it was something he may have mentioned to Robert Barron. Y’know? A map from Hawaii, something leading to a sunken galleon, an old
piece of paper tucked in the case he bought there.”
“Worth killing for?” Grant asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have no perspective on what motivates anyone. I mean, Wall Street gets dumped on, but who isn’t greedy? Is a buried campsite worth more than a person’s home? Is a farkakt religion that put down roots in my boiler room more important than bona fide historical research? Is a bad boy more appealing to me than a good boy? Like I said before, I have no answers.”
That last one was for him, and he knew it. He finished his beer.
“You had a second question?” I said. “Or was it buried in the others.”
“You cut me off earlier,” he said, slipping from the stool and paying for his beer.
“Apologies.”
He dismissed it with a little shake of his head. “I was going to ask—since there apparently wasn’t a breakin—if anyone besides you had a key to your home?”
“Just my dear, dear friend Dr. Reynold Sterne,” I said. “At least, that’s what K-Two told me.”
“Sterne is the professor in charge of the dig?”