“Harry,” Frances said in a weak voice, “This is my friend, Sophie.” She turned to Sophie, who was still giving me the evil eye, and said, “Sophie, this is Harry Stoner. A good friend.”
I sat down at the table and, for a moment, none of us said a thing. After a while, Sophie unfastened her eyes from my face and looked off into the night.
Frances was watching her closely, as if she were taking her cue from what Sophie did and said. She was watching her with her heart in her eyes; and as always happens when you show your heart, you show all—what you love and what you fear.
“You see why I was nervous?” she said to me with a strained laugh and glanced quickly at Sophie.
“What the hell are you apologizing to him for?” the girl said, without turning her head. “And quit ogling me. You make me nervous.”
“I’m sorry,” Frances said.
“Cut it out, Fran,” Sophie said again. “We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
Frances laughed unhappily. “For some reason, it doesn’t feel that way.”
“He’s the reason,” Sophie said. “Can’t you see that?”
“I haven’t said a word,” I said.
The girl turned on me with the quickness of a big, prowling cat. “You don’t have to say anything. In fact, the less you say, the better.” She stared at Frances. “Where’s the money you talked about, Fran? Let’s get this over with.”
“Sophie knows the name of the woman in that photograph you showed me,” Frances explained.
“It’ll cost you a hundred dollars,” Sophie said smugly.
“All right,” I said. “Who is she?”
“I’ll get to it.” The girl reached down beside her and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of a canvas bag. She tapped a cigarette into her hand, lifted it to her mouth, and looked at Fran. “Light me,” she said coldly.
Frances snapped open a lighter and lit her lover’s cigarette. Sophie puckered her lips and let the smoke dribble out of her mouth like a pale, white fluid. Then she licked her upper lip with the tip of her tongue and laughed hoarsely.
I was beginning to feel sorry for Frances. A one-sided relationship isn’t much fun no matter who’s involved in it. A politicized relationship is even worse. And this one looked like it was bound to end in heartbreak.
Sophie reached across the table and clicked the lighter shut. “You’ll burn yourself, sweetie,” she said with a sort of honeyed malice.
Frances ducked her head in embarrassment.
“About the woman?” I said.
Sophie passed her thumb across the tip of her cigarette, knocking the dead ash into a glass ashtray sitting on the table. “The money first,” she said.
I took my wallet out of my coat and handed her four twenties and two tens. She plucked them delicately from my fingers, as if she were trying to avoid touching my flesh. “Her name’s Irene Croft,” she said, as she folded the bills and stuck them in her bag.
“No relation to the Crofts?” I said lightly. The Crofts were one of the first families of the city. Like the Tafts or the Scripps or the Procters of Procter and Gamble.
“I kind of doubt it,” Sophie said wryly. “It would be pretty funny, if she were.”
“How so?”
“She’s kinky, that’s why.”
“And what does that mean?”
Sophie smiled wickedly. “She used to pay me money to have sex with her on the phone. Real dirty sex. She’d tell me what to do and then I’d tell her what to do. It usually lasted a couple of hours. Lots of heavy breathing. That kind of kinky.”
Frances flushed and stood up. “That was a lousy thing to say in front of me,” she said bitterly and ran across the terrace to the bar. Through the picture window I watched her go into the lady’s room.
“Maybe you better go after her,” I said to Sophie.
“Maybe you better mind your own fucking business,” she said in an ugly voice. “Fran knows the way things are.” She took a deep drag off her cigarette and flipped the butt over the terrace wall. “She’s got a lot of growing up to do, that’s all. She was divorced a couple of years ago and she’s still into that desperate married mentality. She still wants to belong to someone—wants to be their property. I’m nobody’s property. And I’m sure as hell not going to take someone else on. Especially someone who hasn’t got her shit half-together.”
She was something, Sophie was. A truly ugly character who lived by sexual whim and would probably die by it. I just hoped she didn’t take my friend with her.
“About Irene Croft?” I said. “What else can you tell me?”
She shrugged. “She used to come to the club a lot—practically a charter member. But I don’t see her much any more. I think she might have straightened out a little, because I caught a glimpse of her a few weeks ago cruising Fourth Street with a leather boy. Irene digs leather. Definitely not my bag.”
Sophie looked up as Fran walked back to the table. Her eyes had a red, scrubbed look behind her glasses and her cheeks were flushed. She stared at Sophie and said, “I think we better go.”
“One last question,” I said. “Do you know where Irene Croft lives?”
Sophie picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “In the Highland House.” She started to put her arm through Frances’s arm, and Frances pulled away. Sophie laughed lightly and sauntered toward the terrace door.
Frances scowled after her, then turned to me. I could tell what was coming from the look on her face. She’d been humiliated and I’d witnessed it. Perhaps she felt I’d been the cause of it. In any case, she was searching for someone other than Sophie to blame.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of each other for a while, Harry.”
“If that’s the way you want it, Frances.”
“That’s the way I want it.” She started to follow Sophie out the door, then looked back at me. “Sophie’s just a little wild, that’s all. But then she isn’t very old. She hasn’t seen a lot of life. And she just doesn’t know how badly she can hurt me.”
I said, “I think she knows exactly how to hurt you, Frances. I think she’s good at it.”
“Oh, for chrissake, Harry!” Frances cried. “Don’t put that trip on me now. I don’t need that trip. It’s been a bad enough evening as it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Anyway, she’s not always like that. She can be very sweet.”
“If you say so, Frances.”
“Oh, Harry,” she said.
For a second we just looked at each other across the terrace.
“I gotta go,” she finally said.
“If you ever need to talk about it, Frances...”
“You’re the one I’ll come to,” she said. “By the way, I ran that check for you and didn’t turn anything up. Your girlfriend isn’t at a shelter, if that’s any help.”
“You’ve been a big help.”
She nodded and walked into the tap room. Through the window I saw her exchange a few words with Sophie. Then they joined arms and walked out of the bar.
13
THERE WAS a cold wind running down the street when I stepped back out into the night. It shook the branches of the mulberry trees on the hill and whistled in the downspouts of the bleak boxy houses. I pulled my sports coat shut and, shoulders hunched, walked up Oregon to my car.
Once inside, I sat for a moment, thinking about Frances. The fact that she was a lesbian hadn’t bothered me. Or only a little. It was her lover, Sophie, who made me sick at heart. It just didn’t seem fair that someone as vulnerable as Frances should end up with someone like Sophie for a lover. Only, fair or not, that was what usually happened. It was just too damn easy to find someone with all the answers—someone so self-involved that he or she didn’t care whether or not they were the right answer for you. Which made me think of Robbie Segal.
I started up the Pinto and circled down to Baum Street—a stretch of concrete so run down that even a Mt. Adams
realtor couldn’t find a way to dress it up—then back up Monastery to Celestial, at the top of the hill. I’d thought I was going to sidestep the bright, hazy lights that evening. But the Highland House was right in the middle of them—a huge steel high-rise on the crest of the hill, with its own barber shop and restaurants and saunas, like a little piece of Miami Beach on the banks of the Ohio. It was where the woman named Irene Croft lived. And, at that moment, Irene Croft was my only lead.
I parked in the guest lot across from the apartment house and stood there for a minute, with the wind riffling my hair, studying that huge rectangular monolith, full of picture windows and railed cement porches and curtain-filtered lamplight. There was only one way in—past a doorman in red livery, posted beneath a canopied entryway at the foot of the building. And the doorman wouldn’t buzz me through to the elevator room until he’d checked with Irene Croft, who wasn’t about to let a private detective named Stoner come up for a chat. So I couldn’t get directly into the apartment house, but I could go into the Celestial—the posh, glassed-in restaurant that occupied most of the ground floor of the high-rise. Then I could wait in the Celestial lobby, across from the elevator room, until a Highland House resident came downstairs for a late night stroll. And when he’d unlocked the inner door that led to the elevators, I’d manage to slip up to Irene Croft’s apartment.
I was thinking about how to get her apartment number as I walked up to the doorman—an elderly black man with a face like a rubber mask.
“Cold night,” I said.
He smiled pleasantly. “Too cold for April. Are you for the restaurant or the apartments, sir?”
“A little of each,” I told him. “I’m supposed to meet one of your tenants for a drink. Her name’s Croft.”
The black man cracked a broad grin. “Miss Irene,” he said, as if he’d raised her from a pup. “You want me to give her a buzz?”
“No,” I said. “She said she’d meet me in the bar. If she isn’t there, I’ll take you up on your offer.”
“No need to come back out in the cold again,” he said. “There’s a house phone in the lobby.”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t remember her apartment number.”
“She’s 2201,” he said.
“High up.”
“ ‘Bout as high as you can get. Man, that’s the penthouse.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
I walked past him into the restaurant lobby—a dark ante-room with red flock walls and gilt trim and a couple of plush chairs for furnishing. Through the portal on the far wall, I could see a maitre d’ sitting at a purser’s desk, bent over his guest list like a conductor studying a score. Beyond him, the dining room shimmered with crystal and silver and snow-flake linen. It was too late for the dinner crowd—nine-thirty by my watch. But there was still a faint drone of table talk coming from inside the room. The high-pitched, vital sounds of men and women at play. I tucked myself away in a corner—on one of the upholstered chairs—and kept an eye on the plate glass doors leading to the elevators.
A few couples sauntered past me out of the restaurant. The men in business suits, looking flushed and pompous as only the well-fed can look. The women in evening gowns, leaning on their men with laughter in their eyes. I sat there like an unbidden guest, watching them come and go. And watching the inner door. And around ten o’clock, the elevators clicked open and I got to my feet. A plump blonde woman in a tartan plaid poncho stepped out and walked to the inner door. She was leading a miniature poodle by a leash. The woman fumbled with her key, trying to keep the dog in line with her free hand. But he was capering around like a lunatic, making little leaps at the plate glass door and humping her leg furiously.
She finally managed to open the lock. And I held the door open for her as she came out.
“Bless you,” she said with distress.
Then the dog broke into a run—its black nails scrabbling across the tile floor—and the woman flew after it, like someone blown away by a sudden wind. I slipped through the door and walked over to the bank of elevators. A minute later, I was on the twenty-second floor.
******
It wasn’t until I actually walked up to the wood-paneled door of Irene Croft’s apartment that I began to wonder what I was doing there. It had occurred to me that I had only the vaguest idea who the woman was and nothing but the photograph to connect her with Robbie Segal. And that wasn’t much to go on. Her sex life, as sordid as it apparently was, didn’t interest me, except as it might have involved Robbie. And whether she was one of the Crofts, which seemed more likely given her penthouse in Mt. Adams, was none of my concern, either. Every family has its black sheep, even the ultrarich, ultraconservative ones. The Crofts just had a doozie, that was all. I decided before I knocked that all I was really interested in was the man in the beret. If I could wheedle his name and address out of Irene Croft, I’d leave her to her obscene phone calls and her leather boys.
It wasn’t a very specific plan of action, but it was the best I could come up with. I went ahead and knocked.
To my surprise, Irene Croft herself answered a few seconds later. She was taller than I’d expected from the photograph and boyishly thin. Tiny breasts, slender hips. She wore a black shirt with western piping and black leather pants with a silver belt through the loops.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was as mellow and vibrant as a plucked guitar string. “Who are you?”
“My name is Stoner,” I said, and, unable to think of anything better to say, added: “I’m a friend of Robbie Segal’s.”
“Oh, yes?” the woman said with enough curiosity in her voice to make me think that she recognized the name. “What do you want?”
“Just to talk to you for a few minutes—about Robbie. She’s been missing for several days and we’re worried about her.”
“You’re a friend of the family’s?”
“Yes.”
The woman looked me over for a second. She had the blackest eyes I’d ever seen—almost all pupil with just a hint of dark blue iris at the circumference. The rest of her face seemed ridiculously ordinary by comparison. Thin lips, off-white teeth, pug nose, square jaw, short gray hair. She would have looked like a tall, skinny Dorothy Parker, if it hadn’t been for those eyes. They gave her an inert, fathomless stare—like a doll’s dead glass gaze.
“Who sent you to me?” she said mildly, as if it hardly mattered.
“If I could come in for a minute...?”
She pulled the door open and stepped aside. “Certainly.”
The entry hall ran behind a huge sunken living room, then continued back to the unlit rooms at the rear of the penthouse. Irene Croft led me down a short stairway to the living room and pointed to a Z-shaped chair. I sat down and took a quick look around me. The entire west wall was plate glass, and the city glowed behind it as if it were a piece of incandescent sculpture designed for that room alone. It was the most breathtaking view of Cincinnati I had ever seen. And it so absorbed me that, for a moment, I didn’t notice that the other walls were hung with remarkable paintings. Picassos, Braques, Cezannes. Giacomettis on the creamy enameled tables. What looked like Moores in the corners. Even the furniture was special—sleek, Italian modern pieces in windswept shades of blue. The only light in the room—in the whole apartment, for that matter—came from the picture window and from the tiny white spots trained on the various artifacts. It made me feel as if I were sitting, after hours, in a museum. A vaguely privileged and slightly uneasy feeling. But then great wealth generally has that effect on me.
“You like my living room?” the woman said with a tickle of pride in her mellow voice.
“Very much. It’s beautiful,” I said, although I was really thinking about the distance between it and the Rostow’s living room.
“I’ve tried to make it as beautiful as I could. If I have to live in this city, I can at least surround myself with beautiful things.”
“You don’t like Cincinnati?”
“On
ly the people who live in it,” she said with a mild laugh. “But I’d decorate my rooms like this no matter where I lived. Collecting fine art is one of my weaknesses.”
“That’s an odd way to put it.”
“I’m an odd woman.” She laughed, exposing her tiny, off-white teeth. “You haven’t come to rob me, have you, Mr....? I don’t believe I caught your name.”
She said it so casually that it shook me—as if she were used to being vandalized, as if she expected it. But then if what Sophie had told me were true, she’d probably had her share of expensive, unreliable friends. “My name is Harry Stoner. And I’ve come to ask you a few questions about Robbie Segal.”
“And how did you get up here, Mr. Harry Stoner?” she said in that same blasé tone of voice.
“I sneaked in,” I told her.
She laughed again. “So enterprising and so handsome. What an unusual combination.”
She sat down on one of the blue Italian sofas and tented her hands at her lips. She would have looked quite at home, if it weren’t for her eyes. Those eyes would never look at home—no matter what city she lived in.
“I asked you a question a few minutes ago and you haven’t answered me yet,” she said from behind her tented fingers. “Who sent you here?”
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the snapshot of her and Robbie and the man in the beret. I passed it over to her, and she held it up to the window—to catch the city light.
“Not a very flattering likeness,” she said softly. “Have you talked to Theo, too?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. I said, “Not yet.”
She gazed out the window at the winking lights. “He’s a very great artist, you know,” she said with a tremor in her voice. The sudden depth of feeling was surprising, given the cynical way she’d talked about everything else—including the possibility of being robbed. She must have heard it herself, because she straightened up in her chair and crossed her legs, as if showing her feelings were just another kind of bad posture. “He’s one of the finest jazz guitarists this city has ever produced. One of the finest in the country.” She said it flatly, like a tour guide reading from a Baedecker.
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