Merilee returned a moment later. “Ned said he noticed it there earlier this evening after he’d been hailing a cab for a tenant. He didn’t see who left it.”
“Too bad. Mind if I borrow one of my old shirts back?”
“Not at all, darling. I’ll get it for you as soon as I call the police.” She picked up the phone, started to dial it.
“Don’t do that, Merilee,” I said quietly.
She stopped. “Why not?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Hoagy, I’ve been attacked!”
“Don’t call the police.”
“But you said yourself someone may have been murdered tonight. You said your apartment was trashed. You said —”
“It may be Cam.”
“What do you mean it may be Cam?”
“I mean he’s a big strong kid, and he’s good with his hands and he’s violent.”
“I see.” She bit her lip fretfully. “You don’t trust him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is he’s hiding something from me, and that it may have cost Skitsy Held her life. Only, say it is Cam. Why would he go to so much trouble to scare me off of this project — threaten me, try to disfigure you? All he has to do is fire me. I don’t get it. I don’t know what’s going on. Until I do, I owe him the benefit of the doubt. Friends … ” I trailed off, swallowing.
“Friends what, Hoagy?”
“Friends don’t call the police on one another.”
She stared at the phone in her hand, then slowly put it down. “Okay, Hoagy. If it means that much to you.”
“Thank you.”
“Hoagy?”
“Yes, Merilee?”
“Why do you keep getting caught in the middle of such messes?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
Somebody was sleeping in my chair.
My new, easy-opening front door was ajar, my reading lamp was on, and Detective Lt. Romaine Very, the rock ’n’ roll cop, was slumped there, snoring. A copy of my second novel lay open in his lap. Another critic. He had changed into a Rangers sweatshirt, jeans, and Pony high-tops. His bike was propped against my bookcase. Lulu sniffed at it, and at him, disagreeably.
“Good and comfy, Lieutenant?” I asked him, my voice raised.
He jumped and sat up blinking, immediately alert. “Yo, saw the hole in the wall, dude. Thought somebody broke in. So I came in to check it out. Waited around for ya.”
“Why didn’t you just put on my jammies and hop into bed?”
“Sorry, dude. It’s this ulcer I got. Used to drink ten, fifteen cups of coffee a day to keep going. Doc won’t let me drink any now, so I keep sort of, like, drifting off.” He got to his feet, popped a piece of gum in his mouth, and began to pace around my apartment, chomping. “Place is a real dive, y’know?”
“Thanks. It’s nice of you to say so.”
“What’s with the hole?”
“Had a break-in a few days ago. Haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed yet.” And what was the point? It wasn’t as if fixing it would keep out anyone who really wanted in. Besides, I’d always wanted cross-ventilation.
He stopped pacing, started nodding to his personal rock ’n’ roll beat. “You report it?”
I shook my head. “Nothing was taken. Must have gotten scared off or something.” I put down some fresh mackerel for Lulu, then found some Bass ale in the fridge and offered him one.
“Naw, I’m off beer, too. Also chocolate and anything spicy, which means no pizza, no souvlaki, no hot dogs, no pastrami, no moo shoo pork, no whatever tastes good. Christ, you ever taste that herbal fucking tea?”
I opened an ale and drank some of it. “Kind of young for an ulcer, aren’t you?”
“Doc says I have an intensity problem,” he replied. “Too much of it.”
“Not exactly a calm line of work either,” I suggested.
“You got that right, dude.”
I glanced at grandfather’s Rolex. “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, Lieutenant, but it’s three a.m. and I’d like to get to bed. Did you want something?”
He flopped back down in my easy chair. “I got a bunch of calls tonight from the press about Miss Held. Seems she was a pretty important lady.”
“In certain circles.”
“You said ya had some kind of appointment with her.”
“I did.”
“What about?” he asked.
“Is that important?” I asked.
He popped his gum and narrowed his eyes at me. “Maybe you oughta just tell me, huh?”
“Tell you what?” I shoved aside the newspapers and magazines piled on the love seat and sat down. “Skitsy Held and I were business acquaintances. I had nothing to do with her jumping.”
“Who said she jumped?”
“You did.” I drank some more of my ale. “Why, have you found something that’s changed your mind?”
He shrugged. “Her dirty laundry.”
“What about it?”
“There wasn’t any. Doorman says she came home in a yellow dress. She died less than an hour later in a blue one. We know she took a shower. But her laundry hamper was empty. No yellow dress. No stockings. No soiled undies. We turned the place upside down. Closets, dressers, everywhere. So, like, where’d the shit go?”
I tugged at my ear. “Laundry room?”
“We checked there.”
“Dry cleaners?”
“She used the Empire Cleaners on Broadway. I called the dude at home. He remembered her right away. She was a regular customer for years. He said she hadn’t been in for at least a week, and none of his people picked anything of hers up tonight. I also talked to her doctor. He said she had no history of depression or other mental illness, and wasn’t seeing a therapist. Not that that necessarily means anything. People can fall off the shelf like that … ” He snapped his fingers. “But still … ”
“You think maybe she was pushed?”
“I’m thinking there’s something a little bizarre going on. Maybe it’s nothing, but sometimes nothing turns into, y’know … ”
“Something?”
He nodded. “Man, I could tell you stories —”
“Now wouldn’t be a good time.” I sipped my ale. “To answer your question, I was there to talk to her about my next novel. I was hoping to get her interested enough in it to sign it up.”
“What’s it about, your new novel?”
“A man and woman who can’t stay together but who can’t stay apart. I’m hoping it reads better than it lives.”
“Why’d you go to her place to talk? Why didn’t you meet her in her office during business hours?”
“Common practice. Editors have most of their creative conversations over meals or drinks.”
“Sure you weren’t involved with her?”
“I told you — I was a business acquaintance.”
“Right, right.” Very yawned and scratched his stomach. “Got wind of a little scuffle recently at Elaine’s,” he said casually. “According to an eyewitness, you and Miss Held had some angry words on the curb outside.”
“A few,” I acknowledged. “You’re a busy guy, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”
“I liked you better when you called me zealous.”
“I liked you better before you started making accusations. I was on the sidewalk in front of Skitsy’s building when she hit the pavement. I couldn’t have pushed her off her terrace and then made it down to the street before she did. The elevator isn’t that fast, and I didn’t happen to have my cape with me. I didn’t kill her.”
“Didn’t say you did, dude,” he said soothingly. “Just trying to figure out what’s going on. Stay with me.”
“I’m with you, I’m with you.”
“Where were you immediately before you got to her place?”
“Walking.”
“Anybody see you?”
“Half of Manhattan.”
“I mean, anybody recognize you?”
I sighed inwardly.
Maybe they would have in the old days, when it was my picture that was plastered all over the newspapers. Not anymore. “No one.”
He nodded. “Hear you’re ghosting Cam Noyes’s memoirs.” I am.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
He stuck his chin out challengingly. “You jerking my chain?”
“I am not.”
“Dickhead lived in my dorm when he was a freshman.”
“You went to Columbia?”
“You sound surprised, dude. Think I’m some kind of Ricky Retardo?”
“Not at all. What did you major in?”
“Romance languages. Did me beaucoup good, too.” He belched. “I hear Miss Held was his first editor.”
“She was.”
“I don’t suppose your meeting with her tonight had anything to do with him.”
“It did not.”
“Just a coincidence?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. Publishing is a small community. Cam and I happened to be at a party she threw recently for another of her writers. She and I got to talking about my new novel. She suggested we get together.”
He gave his gum a workout. “Got an answer for everything, haven’t you, dude?”
I left that one alone.
“What else aren’t you telling me?” he demanded, scowling at me now.
“Nothing I can think of.”
He shook his head. “I’m not supersatisfied.”
“Who among us is?”
He stood up and went over to his bike, still shaking his head. “I ran a check on you, y’know? You got no record, but I still keep getting the feeling you been down this particular road before. Why is that?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t say, Lieutenant. Possibly it’s the tire tracks across my back.”
Romaine Very stood there facing me a minute, his hands on his hips, one knee quaking, chin stuck out. He looked as if he wanted to punch me or say something real nasty. He didn’t do either of those things. He just said, “Whatever,” in a voice filled with quiet menace. And stormed out the door with his bike, gum popping furiously.
CHAPTER TEN
LULU WOKE UP COUGHING, her chest rumbling like the aged Morgan Plus-4 I drove in college, the one I couldn’t find a replacement muffler for. I fixed her a spoonful of lemon and honey — her old bronchitis nostrum — and after she licked it clean, the two of us took a nice, hot shower together. Lulu hates showering with me. I’m not too crazy about it myself. She slips and slides around, and moans and keeps trying to jump out — all this plus the steamy, enveloping stench of fish breath. It’s kind of like bathing with an otter. But she needed the steam for her congestion, and after I warned her it was this or a trip to a vet for a s-h-o-t, she stayed put, withstanding the indignity of hot water beating down upon her head with heroic stoicism.
She seemed to be breathing a little easier when I dried her off. I assured her she was a brave little girl and gave her an anchovy.
Skitsy made the front page of all three morning papers. The Times used a file photo of her standing at a cocktail party with her great discovery, Cam Noyes. The Port had a picture of her tarp-covered body on the bloody sidewalk in front of her building. If you looked real carefully, you could see me standing there in the background, looking tall and dapper and somewhat nauseous.
I read the stories as I cabbed down to Gramercy Park. They played her death as an apparent suicide. None of the suspicions that Lt. Romaine Very had raised in my apartment were included — no mention of her missing clothes, no hint that he felt somebody may have pushed her. He was being careful until he had something more to go on. After all, there were some important people involved here. There was her ex-husband, noted critic and scholar Tanner Marsh, who was quoted as calling her “the most brilliant editor since Maxwell Perkins.” There was that prominent literary agent and gent Boyd Samuels, who called her “a colleague and a friend and a great lady.” There was Cam Noyes, who was not available for comment.
Where was he?
Vic was pulling a fresh-baked cranberry bread out of the toaster-oven when I got there. “I checked Delilah’s place this morning at seven,” he reported. “Again at eight. No sign of either of them. Her mail’s still in the box. She never came home last night.” He reached into his apron and produced a white envelope. “When I got back, this was under the door. For you.”
My heartbeat quickened at the sight of the press-on letters spelling out my name on the outside of the envelope. I ripped it open. Inside it said: Go to Farmington. Nothing more. I stared at it, wondering what it meant. Wondering who’d left it.
“Charlie’s upstairs packing, Hoag,” Vic droned as he poured us coffee. “She sat down here all night waiting for him to come home. He’s a real bastard, you know that?”
I couldn’t disagree with him, so I didn’t.
Vic had moved a white wrought-iron table and a couple of the pastel garden chairs out onto the still-unfinished patio. We took the cranberry bread and our coffee out there and sat in the warm sun.
“Still no sign of that darned contractor,” Vic said. “Charlie keeps calling him and calling him. I’m half tempted to go out to Brooklyn and throttle the guy.”
“He’ll show up when he feels like it and not a moment sooner,” I explained. “All a part of the joy of renovating.”
I was just starting to fill him in on Very’s visit and Merilee’s brush with battery acid when Cam Noyes walked in the front door.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
(TAPE #6 WITH CAM Noyes recorded May 13 in his garden. Appearance is disheveled, eyes bloodshot. Vic brings him coffee, disappears inside, glowering.)
Noyes: Big Vic doesn’t seem particularly happy to see me.
Hoag: He’s disappointed in you — you broke training. Also wounded his professional pride somewhat. Where were you last night, Cameron? (no response) You have heard about Skitsy, haven’t you?
Noyes: Saw it in this morning’s paper. Couldn’t … can’t believe she did this to me.
Hoag: Did what to you?
Noyes: First mother, then father, now Skitsy. … Anybody who matters to me bails out on me. I just … I can’t handle it anymore, you know? I mean, why does this keep happening to me?
Hoag: For what it’s worth, Cameron, Skitsy didn’t do anything to you. Someone did it to her — she was murdered.
Noyes: But the newspapers said —
Hoag: Forget what the newspapers said.
Noyes: W-Who … ?
Hoag: Offhand, I’d have to consider you the top suspect right now.
Noyes: Me?
Hoag: I’ve done my best to shield you from the police, but I can’t shield you for much longer.
Noyes: Damned decent of you, coach, but there’s no need for you to get involved.
Hoag: Goddamn it, I am involved! Don’t pull this shit on me! Where were you last night?!
Noyes: You don’t actually think I killed her, do you?
Hoag: I think you refused to tell me yesterday what Skitsy had on you. I think before I could ask her, someone made sure she couldn’t tell me. I think you can draw your own conclusion.
Noyes: (silence) I went somewhere with Delilah, okay?
Hoag: Where?
Noyes: She gets off on sleaze. It’s her thing, you know? We drove out to this adults-only motel in Ozone Park she wanted to go to, the Galaxy. It’s got porn movies on the TV and round water beds and mirrors on the ceiling and complimentary champagne that tastes like carbonated monkey piss. We fucked all night, okay? She has that early-morning gig on Good Morning America. Before dawn we drove back and I dropped her at the studio. Then I stopped at an all-night diner on Eleventh Avenue and had steak and eggs and bought the newspapers. That’s when I found out about Skitsy. I called Boyd right off. He’s totally blown out. (pause) I’ve just been walking and thinking for the past couple of hours. I cried a little. She was kind of a second mother to me, you know?
Hoag: Let’s
not get too oedipal.
Noyes: Okay, maybe we had a sick relationship. But it was a relationship. I haven’t had many.
Hoag: She was killed a little before seven last night. Where were you?
Noyes: On our way to the motel. We got there at about a quarter to eight.
Hoag: Stop anywhere on the way?
Noyes: For hamburgers at a White Castle on Ridgewood Avenue.
Hoag: Kind of an all-around classy evening.
Noyes: Coach, I have no idea what happened to Skitsy, or why it happened. That’s the truth. I may be scum, but I’m not a killer. Christ, no. Where’s Charlie?
Hoag: Upstairs packing.
Noyes: Good. I’m glad she’s over me.
Hoag: I wouldn’t say she’s over you, but she is leaving you.
Noyes: Any idea for where?
Hoag: She can stay at my place for now, if she wishes.
Noyes: Well, well.
Hoag: It’s not like that. I won’t be around. Going away for a couple of days on personal business. Strictly an aboveboard offer.
Noyes: It needn’t be. On my account, I mean.
Hoag: Duly noted. Why would you want Skitsy dead?
Noyes: I wouldn’t. I didn’t.
Hoag: Cameron, if I’m going to stick my neck out for you I have to know the whole story. I’ll ask you again — What did Skitsy have on you?
Noyes: I already told you, you needn’t stick —
Hoag: What was it, goddamnit!
Noyes: Stop yelling at me!
Hoag: I’ll stop yelling when you start answering! Why didn’t you break it off with Skitsy?! Tell me!
Noyes: (long silence) That’s what I’ve been thinking about all morning, actually. Telling you. It’s … It’s been slowly killing me inside. The horror if it. The guilt. Wanting to get it off my chest. I-I can’t stand it anymore. I really can’t. And now that she’s dead … Shit, I didn’t kill her. You have to believe me. Do you? (no response) She can’t tell on me anymore. Can’t hurt me. That’s a tremendous … it’s a relief. My secret is safe now. I’m safe. Except for you, damn it. You think I’m some kind of liar or killer, and I can’t handle that. I want you to know the truth, coach. I’m going to tell you the truth. But only if you promise to leave it out of the book. This is just between you and me. It’s personal, understand?
The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 13