Bloody London

by Reggie Nadelson

  She snickered. “One of Thomas Pascoe’s relatives, I swear to God. He had a hunk of land he sold to the developer who built this place. I bet Pascoe was frothing like a dog.” She looked out the window again. “They don’t own the street. They don’t own the views. They don’t even own their own airspace anymore, not really, because at certain times of day we block out their sunlight.” She stretched like a little cat and glanced out at the river.

  “They tried to strongarm the board here; it didn’t work. Me, I’m queen of my condo now. Nothing happens I don’t hear. Bloody marvelous, don’t you think?”

  Lulu delivered her zesty appraisal with gusto. It didn’t completely hide the bitterness or the humiliation of the night her husband vomited in the Pascoes’ bathroom. She looked at her watch.

  I said, “Thanks. You’ve been great.”

  “Any time. Feel free. Come by. And Artie?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “So you’re like some kind of private eye?”

  “Some kind.”

  “They all dress as good as you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I better go change. We’re having a reunion tonight, me and Gary. Pre Halloween. We’re going to try to pick up the pieces, drink some good wine, go dancing maybe, celebrate. You want me to nose around for you?”

  “Sure,” I said. I liked her. If I wasn’t settled with Lily, if Lulu and Gary were not getting it together, I would have asked her to dinner.

  At the door, I said again, “What’s the celebration?”

  Lulu Fine’s face lit up. “Celebrate bloody Thomas Pascoe dying.”

  7

  “This is Frances Pascoe,” the voice said into the phone. “Please come.”

  Frances Pascoe called and I ran. When I got to her building, she wasn’t home and I was mad as hell. Most of the day – it was the day after I met Lulu Fine – I followed a paper trail, played cat and mouse with Mrs Pascoe and felt like an old piece of cheese. I ended up in Janey Cabot’s office. Like Lulu Fine, Cabot was on Frances Pascoe’s list. I looked at my watch. It was after six. When I finished with Cabot, I was going back to the Middlemarch. Mrs Pascoe was going to talk to me. I’m generally pretty easy about witnesses who are assholes, but I was major-league pissed off.

  Cabot was late. She kept me hanging around and I sat in the waiting room of her office on 57th Street and thumbed through copies of the magazine she edited. House stuff. Shelter books, they call them, according to my pal and neighbor Ricky Tae, who knows this stuff back to front and keeps a finger in the style trade.

  Eventually, a tall thin girl in a long black skirt appeared, looked me over, then turned, her boots going tap tap, stiletto heels hitting the floor, as she drawled, “Janey says will you come please?” The accent was English, the voice nasal. I followed her into a corridor. She was so thin you could snort coke off her hip.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  Without blinking, she said, “Neige.”

  I kept a straight face and followed her.

  More girls – you couldn’t call them women – pale faces, concave chests, five-inch stilettos, strode hard along the corridors like they wanted to stick holes in the floor. Their eyes darted toward the offices that gave off the corridor. Rich kids. Twenty-somethings whose parents bought them a life in New York while they worked as assistants at magazines and publishing houses. They were erotic in a creepy way, something aggressive and vulnerable about the skinny bodies – the “soulless size twos”, Rick calls them. They made me think about mindless sex, kinky hardcore stuff – it wasn’t just the starved bodies or bruised, smudgy eyes, but the braindead speech and furtive ambition.

  The magazine shared offices with a fashion book, and Neige pushed past racks of clothing that included puffballs of fur in purple and orange, and big ballerina dresses in plastic bags that resembled fragile animals trapped in nets.

  When I finally got inside Cabot’s office, she looked like she was clutching razor blades. She glanced at me.

  “It wasn’t any bloody accident that they rejected me, you know. Bastards. Bastards!” Janey Cabot said.

  Cabot’s office had padded walls that looked like green silk, window sills lined with orchids in glazed blue pots, stacks of art books. Antique furniture. She said, “Close the door,” and by the time I shoved it shut with my foot, she was looking hungry for attention.

  “You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?” Janey Cabot said, in one of those English voices that’s rich as honey and cold as ice at the same time. Smoking was forbidden in the building, but this style queen was not a woman who shared her smokes out on the pavement with the secretaries and limo guys. She reached over to take one out of my pack. She was a good-looking woman if she would have smiled, tall, thin, legs up to her armpits, tight white suit. She said, “Sit, for heavens’ sake.”

  For a moment she smoked and watched me, and I smoked and looked at the long shelf behind her desk. On it was a collection of old gold-colored glass. Then she gestured to some photographs on a low metal table. “Tell me what you think of these images.”

  I looked down at pictures of rooms stripped almost bare. Minimalist, you’d call it. Not a lot of comfort in those houses. I said, “Expensive.”

  “Very. That’s the point. You can look but you can’t quite touch. House and home, it’s our pornography.”

  Neige came back with a bottle of vodka and some glasses.

  “Go home, Neige,” Cabot said and poured herself a drink. She offered me one. I shook my head.

  What was she? Forty? The great New York women, you can’t tell. It isn’t the face lifts or liposuction; it’s the assurance, the assumption of life in the center of the universe, the money.

  Cabot knocked back her drink and said, “I’ll tell you about the bloody Middlemarch if you’re so interested.” She poured more vodka.

  “Tell me,” I said. “After all, it’s your best shot at revenge,” I said, and I saw I’d made contact.

  “They rejected me. Me.” She hissed when she said it and bared her teeth, plush red lips curled back over the gums. “Rejected me as if I were what? A Jew? So I was friends with actors, writers, fags. But they don’t tell you. The co-op board makes its own rules. I know about the board meetings where they blackball people.” She gasped for breath. “I thought I was in.”

  “You had the dough?”

  “Of course I had the money. It’s not that kind of building. No one asks to see your financials, you’re simply known to them or you’re not and I was, of course, I was, and then this.”

  It was what Frances Pascoe said.

  “It was in writing, that you were in?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  I played dumb. “But you still want to live there?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re invited to an interview, you leave, they talk about you. Tommy Pascoe liked it if you were involved, that’s what he said.”

  “Involved in what?”

  “Charity. I had the magazine sponsor design competitions for his ridiculous homeless shelters, I sat on committees, ate the wretched dinners, then they rejected me. It’s the most humiliating thing in my whole utterly miserable suck-up of a life.” Suddenly she looked up and stared at me. “And they never tell you why.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the point. They don’t tell you why you’re rejected.”

  “Why’s it matter so much? There’s other places to live.”

  “Everyone knows everyone. They live in the same buildings, the kids go to the same schools, they read the same columns. They all know, even the maître d’s, even the fucking sales people selling overpriced crap on Madison Avenue who get write-ups in the New Yorker. They sit around, they dish! The PR queens, the Hollywood press agents, who are suck-ass idiots, scum you wouldn’t wipe off your shoe. But it’s early in New York, you start with London. Later, there’s the Coast. That’s how your news gets made. Even the bloody realtors hear. You have to compete to get the right real
estate broker these days, you understand me? These people are celebrities now. You have to make the cut.”

  “Like Salvatore Castle?”

  “How the hell do you know Castle?” She opened her bag and pulled a neatly rolled joint out of it. “Give me a light.”

  Cabot shed her jacket, and her arms inside the sleeveless T-shirt were surprisingly muscular. It could have been a woman who killed Pascoe. Cabot had the muscle to use a heavy weapon, the kind someone used on Pascoe. She had the fury.

  She leaned back in her chair, put her legs on the table, crossed her feet, which were encased in the skins of expensive reptiles. She inhaled. “I was in. Then the bitch starts on my being single.”

  “What?”

  “It was the final straw. They said, ‘Oh and there’s another thing, Cabot’s a single woman.’”

  “Single.” I didn’t get it.

  “Don’t be a dolt. It was an excuse. They said there would be men visiting late at night. Bitch.”

  “So you want to let me know where you were early Monday morning?”

  “I was home. Asleep.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. I’ve told them. I’ve told the wretched police. You can talk to my lawyer if you want, I wasn’t alone, all right? Now bugger off.”

  I got up. “What bitch? I thought it was Thomas Pascoe who ran the building.”

  She looked up. “It wasn’t him. It was her. It was Frankie Pascoe, all right?”

  I got up to go; she called me back. “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “You were with Lily Hanes, weren’t you?”

  “I still am. Why, it’s something to you? You know Lily?”

  “I know pretty much everyone. Lily’s not exactly a wallflower. Anyhow, she was at the network in the Eighties in London, I was still there. I don’t run into that many people who date cops, after all, do I? Word gets out.”

  The air was thick with her rancor. “You remember any of the board members other than Pascoe?”

  “Yes. The most decent of them was Victor something or other. A fag and a Jew, but decent. Not a Yid or anything.”

  “What?”

  “Oh come on, you know what I mean, Mr Cohen. There are Jews and there are Yids, you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  I was half-way through the door. I thought about Pascoe and how he came on to Lulu Fine. On a hunch, I turned around and pulled the Times obit out of my pocket. It had a picture of Thomas Pascoe. I tossed it on her desk. She looked away.

  “One other thing,” I said.

  She snarled now. “What?”

  “You were screwing Thomas Pascoe, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  8

  Frances Pascoe was waiting for me, and before I could open my mouth she said, “You’ll be wanting to know if my husband banged Janey Cabot or the others before or after he rejected them for apartments. Won’t you?” In the background, very faint, I heard music.

  I left Janey Cabot and went to the Middlemarch. Cabot’s description of the Pascoes and their games left a sour taste in my mouth. I figured I was going in to see her, whatever she wanted.

  Sweeney was at the door, but this time I dropped a couple names in his ear – my ex-boss was a famous Irish cop – and he let me in and I went up and found Mrs Pascoe’s door already open.

  It was Stan Getz playing in that apartment somewhere, very round, very sweet tones. It surprised me. I followed Frances Pascoe into a library. The music got louder and I saw an old-fashioned turntable where a vinyl played, a Getz version of “How about you”, Lou Levy on the piano, that I like a lot.

  Two walls were covered with books, one had windows that looked out over the river and sky, the other was jammed with paintings. She pointed at a chair, then sat on the rug herself, feet under her, wearing gray flannel pants and a white cotton shirt.

  “How come you gave me the names after all?”

  “You’re a nice guy.”

  “How come you let me in?”

  “I needed the company. And you apparently charmed Mr Sweeney.”

  The paintings were lit right and they were something: a collage by Matisse; a picture by David Hockney of a woman by a window. An Edward Hopper. Things I would put on my walls if I had dough. I stared at them.

  “Sit down. Please. Just sit down. I want to talk.”

  I sat.

  I said, “You like that music?”

  “Yes. But I knew him.”

  “You knew Stan Getz?”

  She said, “Yes, I did, I knew Stan. I slept with Stan, if you want to know.” She laughed. “Why? Does it make you like me better?”

  I said, “Yeah, it does,” and she said, “Do you want a drink? I’m having martinis. Lots of them. I’m a prisoner, so I indulge. Half and half. My sort of half and half.” She held up a bottle of Gordons gin in one hand and a liter of Stoli in the other, and I shook my head. She smiled. “I thought you might be my Prince Charming. Rescue me from the tower here. No martini? Something else?”

  “A Coke would be OK. Thanks. Or a beer. What do you mean, a prisoner?”

  “I go out, the TV people jump me, media comes at me like a shitstorm. There’s a pantry down the hall, if you wouldn’t mind. I think there’s beer. I’ve given the maid the night off. Case the joint if you want,” she said, and I went and found some cans of Bud Lite in a small refrigerator, then took a tour, the music fading as I got further away.

  The apartment occupied the whole floor. It was huge, twelve rooms, maybe more. I lost count. Two apartments had been joined, including, I figured, the place Cabot and Fine wanted. The apartment to die for or kill for. Christ. The place the Pascoes bought for themselves in the end.

  Bedrooms, a formal living room, dining room, kitchen, library, a music room for chrissake with a beautiful Steinway grand. Ebony. Surface like silk. I opened it and hit a few keys lightly, wished I could play.

  But it was Mrs Pascoe’s bathroom that seduced me. It was big, it had a fireplace and a free-standing tub, and a dressing room with a half-dozen cherrywood closets. The surface was so rich and sleek you wanted to stroke the wood and I went down the row and touched the doors.

  The closets swung open. Each was filled with immaculate rows of suits and dresses, racks of shoes, piles of linen shirts and silk blouses, all colors of white or cream or the color of bone. The scale surprised me; Frances Pascoe had worn the same things three days running, the gray pants, the plain shirts, but maybe it was her mourning gear.

  All the main rooms had views of the river, the sky, the red neon Pepsi-Cola sign winking on the horizon, over the border in Queens.

  In Thomas Pascoe’s study I foraged in the papers, but Homicide had been all over the place already. There was a small sculpture on the desk, a pair of bronze hands. Begging hands, size of a child’s. And lifelike. I picked them up and turned on the desk lamp. But the hands, in the light, were wrinkled, joints swollen. An old man’s hands, and so alive I felt I’d touched real flesh.

  Beer in one hand, the bronze in the other, I went back to the library.

  She looked up. “You enjoyed the tour of my apartment?”

  “Very nice, but what can I really do for you? What do you want?”

  I sipped some beer, watched her curl up on the sofa; in the low light she could have been thirty. I sat on a chair. Put some distance between us.

  “You tell me,” she said, but her attention was taken up with the picture of herself that suddenly appeared on the small TV she had placed on the coffee table. In it she wore a black velvet evening dress, low cut, big skirt, and looked stunning.

  “The Met. I think. The Whitney. The opera.” She peered at the screen. “Some shit.” Frances Pascoe was pretty drunk. “I want to know what you know. What Ulanova said. What the others tell you.”

  I could play her game. “It’s privileged.”

  “Bullshit. I gave you the names. It’s your turn.”

  I finished my drink. “You want my help, then you help me.”
r />   “Can I call you Artie? Where are you from? Where were you born?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Make some conversation with me, all right? Humor me. I’m a widow. I need a friend.”

  “I was born in Moscow.”

  “I liked Moscow.”

  “Why?”

  “I was happy there. Tommy was posted there once very briefly by his bank and I was happy. Are you homesick?”

  “You must be kidding.”

  She sipped her drink. “What do you hate now, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  She was drunk, we were going around in circles. I said, “It’s your husband. Talk to me, don’t talk to me, but it’s me or else some detective from a local precinct who’s angry because you’ve got so much dough, or a hot-dog homicide guy who will retail it all to the Post.”

  “I told you. Tommy cared too much for this building. In a way, towards the end, it was his life.”

  “That bored you?”

  She shrugged. “I was much younger.”

  “You said I had something invested in this case. You said it was you.”

  She said, “Did I? I don’t remember.”

  All the time I sat in her library, Mrs Pascoe seemed to circle me, like an animal with potential prey, charming, then withdrawn, then coming on heavy. She could eat you alive, I figured, and I reached for the gin and poured a shot for myself, then got up and went to the window, cooled my face against the glass. There wasn’t much air in her hothouse of a co-op.

  “Artie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Help me, will you?”

  “I’m trying. Your husband told you everything he did?”

  “Obviously not. You’ve met Janey Cabot.”

  “You knew.”

  “Everyone knew, darling. Small town. He banged her a few times, so what? I suppose he met her at some charity thing. You were hoping perhaps that she applied for the apartment first and Tom took advantage. I mean, Tommy’s philandering wasn’t a real problem, if you’ll forgive the old-fashioned word. Rather a good word, philandering, don’t you think? He couldn’t do much but he liked looking. It was nothing to do with me. It was a twitch, a neural itch. In fact, he had Janey after we rejected her. I suppose she kept on hoping.”