“Sure.”
He pointed at my T-shirt. “What is this?” He saw the question in my eyes. “This ‘Champion Spark Plugs’? Que es?”
I looked down. “For crying out loud, Champion Spark Plugs are Champion Spark Plugs. The shirt’s a freebie from when I ran my own shop. You know, the sales reps come by with stuff.”
“Yes, but what is it? What is Champion Spark Plugs? I ask because that’s a truly iconic logotype. And what sort of shop did you run?”
I looked at him awhile. I wondered if he was kidding around, decided he wasn’t. Esio had produced a BlackBerry and stood with thumbs poised to take notes.
I said, “Champion and spark plugs is like McDonald’s and hamburgers.”
Weinberg nodded over tented fingers. “Esio,” he said, “see if anybody’s done anything with this Champion Spark Plugs.” Esio was already on it, thumb-typing away.
I said, “My shop worked on European cars. Mostly Germans, but some Saabs and Volvos, too.”
“Really!” He looked me up and down with smiling eyes. I half wanted to punch him in the face, or at least pull my Sharpie again. Weird thing, though: The other half of me wanted to please Weinberg, wanted to keep him interested. I said, “Before that I raced cars. NASCAR.”
“Goodness,” he said. “Were you a television superstar, walking around in one of those cute little billboard jumpsuits? Did you hold hands with your Implants Barbie wife and pretend to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’?”
“Drank myself out of a ride before I made the big time,” I said. “That’s how I met Tander Phigg. AA.”
Weinberg sighed, sipped water. Esio left us. As he disappeared behind a Japanese-looking screen, his BlackBerry rang.
I gave Weinberg a two-minute recap on Phigg. He listened well. When I was done he tapped his teeth and squinted. “’Twas many years ago, and Tander Phigg was a barely memorable player during a very memorable time. Indeed, but for that awful name I doubt I’d recall him at all.”
Esio returned, silent as usual. Weinberg sensed him and flicked a go-away hand, but Esio approached anyway and spoke in his ear, then stood at attention.
“Evan downstairs wants to call the police and report a hate crime,” Weinberg said. “Please explain.”
I explained. When I was done Weinberg looked at me ten seconds. Then he threw his head back and laughed like hell. Esio took the cue, laughing just as hard and for exactly the same duration.
Finally Weinberg took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his blue suit and dabbed the corners of his eyes. He said to Esio, “Tell Evan to put down the phone, take the rest of the day off, and return tomorrow with a clean forehead.”
“Bug and tar remover,” I said.
They looked at me. “Bug and tar remover, like you use to clean the front of your car?” I said. “It’ll take that Sharpie right off. You can get it at Walmart, if there’s one nearby.”
Weinberg cracked up again, doubling over, saying “bug and tar remover” over and over. When he had it out of his system he told Esio to relay the message. “And do get a picture of Evan before he leaves, please.”
I let him settle down. After a while I said, “Tander Phigg.”
“Of course,” he said. “As noted, he was a mediocrity, a not-quite. I believe the current word is wannabe.”
I waited. Weinberg sipped water and squinted at nothing, pulling memories. I listened to a jazz duo, guitar and bass, on the invisible speakers.
Finally Weinberg nodded to himself and told it.
He thought Phigg had appeared on the scene in 1960 or so. I asked if it could be ’58. He snapped his fingers and said yes, it was before JFK.
By then, Weinberg was an established kingpin in Manhattan’s modern art and queer scenes. He’d graduated from Yale in ’43, had done a Navy stint counting crates on New York Harbor docks at the tail end of World War II. Then he’d launched one of the first avant-garde studios. In 1949, he said, he’d bought the building we were sitting in.
In 1958, when Phigg wandered down from Fitchburg and declared himself a boho photographer, carpetbaggers like him were a dime a dozen to New York’s artsy types. “So predictable,” Weinberg said. “The ghastly portfolio, the Charlie Parker fetish, the two-month beard, the Karl Marx phase, the Jackson Pollock phase. Of course, the gay tryst was often part of the checklist, and we didn’t complain about that.”
Weinberg meandered for ten minutes, rehashing stories from the time that had nothing to do with Phigg. I let him, hoping he’d talk his way around to a Phigg memory sooner or later.
It paid off. Weinberg snapped his fingers. “He was a photographer, wasn’t he?”
I nodded.
“I remember because they were at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, all those boys from Indiana who bought Hasselblads because they couldn’t draw a straight line.” Weinberg nodded, remembering like hell now. “A few of us were forced to admit, bitterly and with no goodwill whatsoever, mind you, that this Phigg might have a dram of actual talent.”
The memory led to others. There’d been rumors that Phigg’s father was loaded, even more so than most carpetbaggers’ parents. The rumors were confirmed when he invited a few of Weinberg’s comrades to his apartment—that doorman building on the Upper West Side.
Weinberg looked at me like he’d delivered a punch line, but from my nonreaction he saw I didn’t get it. “It was the worst thing he could have done, don’t you see? Any credibility he’d built up through merit was dashed forever when we learned he was merely slumming down here.”
“Why?”
“Because it was a revolution, dear heart. We were proud to live the way we lived. This was very early, before SoHo was SoHo, really. I’d bought this building with money I didn’t have. I daresay it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but we didn’t know that then. I didn’t rent out lofts to be trendy; I rented out lofts to pay the mortgage.”
“But the kids you rented to, the carpetbaggers,” I said. “They all had rich daddies, didn’t they?”
“Of course, but they had the decency to hide the fact,” he said. “And Tander Phigg’s failure to grasp that was indicative. He never quite got it. He was a born outsider.”
I thought about that. “He wasn’t enough of a phony.”
“If you insist.” He waved that long hand, thumbed his chin, remembered some more. “As I say, it just about dashed his credibility forever. Everybody froze him out for a year or more. And you haven’t seen a proper freeze-out until you’ve seen one conducted by a bunch of art queens. Tander Phigg might as well have been invisible.”
A gust slapped rain against the windows like bird shot, hard enough to make us both look.
After a while I said, “So you all gave him the cold shoulder for a year. Did he make a comeback?”
“He did, bless his heart, and a grand one at that. Some said it was calculated. Bosh and piffle, said I, Tander Phigg wasn’t capable of such cunning.”
He wanted me to ask.
I waited.
But he waited better: He half turned in his chair, picked up a glass and the pitcher, poured.
“You win,” I said. “What was Phigg’s big move?”
He poured himself water, sipped, looked at the glass, savored his moment. “He took up with Myna Roper.”
I waited, watching Weinberg hide a smirk.
Finally I said, “Who the hell is Myna Roper?”
“Beautiful girl, an Amazon, six feet tall and the prettiest skin I’ve ever seen. She handled phones and filing for a piano mover down the block, if memory serves. But what made her interesting was that she sat as a model, here and in the Village, to augment her income.”
I poured myself a glass of water, watched Weinberg smile at nothing. “She was sketched and shot by thousands of horny little carpetbagger artist-boys,” he said. “She had the surprisingly rare capability of working in the nude and maintaining some dignity about it, which tended to make the horny little artist-boys hornier, you see?”<
br />
“No.”
“She played both virgin and whore in their sticky little dreams, and thus cowed the absolute hell out of them.”
“So Phigg worked up the guts to ask out a cute model,” I said. “Was it really that big a deal?”
“Oh dear, I left out a pertinent detail.” Weinberg sipped to mask his smirk, then set down his glass and looked me in the eye. “Mister Sax, Myna Roper was a great strapping negress. Black as the ace of spades, in fact.”
CHAPTER NINE
We felt another gust, watched rain rattle windows. “White guy dating a black girl,” I said. “What year are we up to?”
“’Sixty-one. It’s easy to pinpoint because we were all giddy over JFK and Jackie. Camelot, you know, ‘Ahsk not.…’ All things were possible, which is why Tander Phigg’s timing was exquisite, whether by luck or design.”
“So nobody held it against them?”
Weinberg laughed. “Against them? They became celebrities, an absolute must-have couple at parties and openings! They were instant A-listers, though we lacked the term.”
“Invite the mixed couple, prove how … naughty you are?”
“I’m sure we all preferred ‘progressive’ or ‘forward thinking,’ but basically, yes.”
“Phigg went from the shithouse to the penthouse, just like that.”
“Well put!” Weinberg said. “I don’t think he realized exactly why, second-rater that he was. We used to have endless arguments about the couple. Some styled Tander Phigg a Machiavellian mastermind, especially when he parlayed Myna into a couple of one-man shows. I said nonsense, the schlemiel simply loves the girl. You could see it in his dull little eyes.”
Esio appeared and spoke in Weinberg’s ear. Weinberg looked at his watch. “Five minutes,” he said to Esio. “My apologies,” he said to me, making a what-can-you-do shrug. “A telephone meeting.”
I said, “What happened to Phigg and Myna Roper?”
“I was just trying to recall,” he said. “And let me say I’ve enjoyed this, Mister Sax. I’ve hit that dreadful age at which memories from half a century ago are far preferable to today’s. Not to mention clearer.”
He sighed, stared at nothing, tapped fingernail to teeth. “There was a vague disaster of some sort, as there had to be. Nobody was certain what iceberg the SS Tander and Myna hit. The uncertainty led to bitchy speculation, of course. An abortion? A parental discovery? Who knows? But sometime in late ’sixty-one or ’sixty-two, Tander and Myna absented themselves without warning. I heard she headed south, where she’d come from, and he went back to Massachusetts and daddy’s money.”
“Do you know where she came from?”
“South Carolina rings a bell, but please don’t hold me to it.”
“How about I leave you my number?” I said. “Maybe somebody else from back then remembers. You can ask around.”
“You may give the number to Esio, but whom, exactly, would I ask?” He spread his hands. “They’re all dead.”
* * *
I thumped northeast on I-95, wipers set on intermittent in fading rain. I wished my truck had an automatic transmission, stared at the ass end of a semi. Somebody had finger-written WASH ME on the semi’s roll-up door. Underneath, somebody else had written BLOW ME.
It was just after four. I was tired, tired, tired. Felt like a week since I got cold-cocked at Motorenwerk, but it was just three days ago. There’d been a lot of action since then, which was okay. But there’d been a lot of talk, too.
People talk too much.
Traffic gained speed once I cut north on I-91. But not much. There was no sense jumping lanes; I tucked in behind the BLOW ME truck and rode, thought about what to do next.
I needed to check in with Randall and Charlene but decided to take four hours without palaver while I could.
I half smiled. Palaver was a word from my dad, the only fancy word ever used by the welder from Mankato, Minnesota. He ditched me and my mom when I was eleven, hooked up with a stock-car team in Massachusetts. When I was thirteen, I came east to live with him. That’s how I learned to be careful what I wished for: By the time I moved in, my dad was drinking hard. I hadn’t seen him but once since I dropped out during my junior year of high school.
The exit for I-84 surprised me. I cut off a semi and settled in for the run to Massachusetts.
Fathers and sons. Tander Phigg Senior, Junior, the Third. I thought about Phigg Junior’s five happy years in New York.
It was easy to picture Phigg Senior the industrialist, getting pissed when his son ran off to play Artsy Photo Boy. It was easy to picture Senior keeping tabs on Junior—informally, through the grapevine, or not so informally, through a detective. When Senior learned about the black girlfriend, he must’ve hit the roof. It was easy to picture him laying down the law, telling his son to cut the bullshit and come home—or get cut out of the trust fund, the will.
As I thought this through I kept tripping over something. Figured out what it was while I crept toward the tolls where I-84 emptied into the Massachusetts Turnpike. Chas Weinberg was fuzzy on some details, but he’d been dead-nuts certain that Phigg was a second-stringer, a dime-a-dozen wannabe.
That didn’t square with the Tander Phigg, Jr., I knew, the Phigg whose stories got bolder as time passed, who came on strong. The Phigg I knew was brash, a man who’d bragged about his river mansion and flipped up his polo-shirt collar even when he was living in a shack.
Far as I was concerned, brash was for the young. Hang around long enough, life stomps the brash out of you. But it seemed the opposite was true for Tander Phigg. Maybe that was why I hadn’t liked him.
I wondered if there was more bad blood between Phigg and Trey than Trey had let on. Sure, Randall’s timetable made him look like a long shot. But it couldn’t hurt to learn more.
Mass. Pike East, homebound on autopilot while the sun set behind me. I faced a choice—Framingham or Shrewsbury? If I ran to Framingham I could fill in Randall, maybe get Trey to say more about his father.
But Shrewsbury meant Charlene, not to mention Sophie.
I smiled and headed for Shrewsbury.
* * *
Next morning. Saturday. The sun rolled across my chest as I woke up, stretched in twisted sheets, opened my eyes.
Charlene sat on the bed in a towel, staring at me and idly scratching my chest. I looked at her blue eyes, her damp hair. She bleaches it. I pretend I don’t know.
I said, “Time?”
“Ten past eight.”
“Wow.” I’m usually an early riser.
“You slept like a dead man. You snored like a chain saw. I kicked you.”
I grabbed at her towel. She held it closed. “This bed,” she said, and bounced a couple of times to remind me how it squeaked.
“Didn’t stop us last night.”
Charlene didn’t laugh, didn’t open the towel as I expected. “You came back here,” she said. “Why?”
“I was on the Pike. I thought about here, I thought about my house. Here was where I wanted to be.”
She nodded, looked at nothing, finger-twirled my chest hair without knowing it. After a while she leaned over and kissed my cheek. Then she rose and went to her walk-in closet.
I gave myself three minutes in the sunbeam, then hit the shower.
* * *
I stepped out the front door with three waffles in my belly. The rain had pushed the heat past, made perfect weather. I needed a Windbreaker now but knew I’d spend most of the day in a T-shirt.
The weekend plan was to drywall a room in the Framingham house. But I checked messages as I climbed into my truck and found the plan blown up: Randall had texted he’d be gone all weekend. Hadn’t said where.
I frowned at the message and started to get sore at him, then felt like a jerk. He’d done more for me than I deserved. I shot him a text with the bare bones of what I’d learned from Weinberg: Phigg’s years in NYC, his affair with Myna Roper, a black gal probably from South Carolina, Phigg whimp
ering back to Fitchburg.
Two seconds after I hit Send, the phone buzzed. It was Josh from Motorenwerk. I picked up and asked how Ollie was doing.
“He wants to see you,” he said, so quiet I barely heard. Then he said an address and a few landmarks in Mason, New Hampshire, a border town near Rourke. He clicked off before I could ask anything.
* * *
Last thing I wanted to do on a Saturday was slog north again, but I needed to hear whatever Ollie had to say. Hell, I needed to take a harder look at him for the murder—he obviously had bad blood with Phigg. It wasn’t crazy to wonder if Phigg had learned about the heroin-packing scam and tried to work an angle somehow.
So seventy minutes later I was on Route 123, paralleling a railroad bed. I slowed and looked to my right for one of the landmarks Josh had mentioned—a mailbox set in a stack of steel wheels. Spotted it, pulled in, bounced a quarter mile down a dirt road. The road opened into a clearing.
I sat in my truck, looked around the clearing, didn’t like the vibe. Two half-rotted F-100s and a Bronco were jacked up stupid-tall, monster-truck style. Jesus, one of the F-100s had a goddamn machine gun mounted in its bed, looking like something from the old Rat Patrol TV show. Four cheapo travel trailers, 1970s vintage, huddled in a half-assed semicircle. Three scrawny wild turkeys gobbled and pecked the hardscrabble.
The main building sagged like hell. It was white forty years ago and had cinder-block front steps. A TV satellite lay in the yard where it’d fallen off the roof and never been fixed. Farther off I saw an outbuilding. Miserable dog-yelps carried from it.
I didn’t like it one bit. If Josh and Ollie had landed here, that was their problem. I put my truck in reverse and was easing the clutch out when a screen door banged. “Mister Sax! Mister Sax!”
Shit. It was Josh, waving, fast-walking toward me, grinning. The grin didn’t make sense until I looked hard—it was the nervous type that masked big-time fear.
I sighed and killed the motor. “What the hell is this place?”
Josh’s mouth fluttered like he wanted to cry. “You said take him wherever he wanted to go,” he finally said, anger flashing through the fear. “This was it.”
Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Page 9