Lost in New York: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 5)

by J. J. Henderson

  It was after four when she stepped outside. The rain had stopped. She flagged a cab and headed home, way past wasted. She couldn't even summon the energy to ask herself, now that it was over, what she had hoped to accomplish by accompanying young Tim Bob back to his hotel room. She supposed it was something as simple as a good fuck she was after—one without emotional complications, or tired bodies, or unreasonable expectations, or any of the other stuff that seemed to pile on every time you took off your clothes and got into bed with someone. She should have known—she did know—that such things only exist in dreams. At Broome and Broadway she paid the cabbie, slipped into the building, and quietly mounted the stairs. She let herself into her loft, greeted the dog for half a minute, then noticed her message light was blinking. She had gotten two calls between nine pm and four am. Oh shit.

  The first: "Hi, Lucy, it's me." Patty. Sniffling. "Shit, you were right. He's an asshole. Oh, fuck, Lucy what am I going to do? I came home and he was here and kind of high, and he wanted me to...oh, Lucy, why can't I ever get it right?" She burst into tears, cried for a moment, then stopped. "Shit. I'm sorry. I just wanted to talk to you is all. You can say I told you so, but you're my friend so...I know you won't. Call me tomorrow, please. I've got to do something to change my life."

  The second: "Hi Lucy it's your mother. It's...are you there, are you there? Please Lucy please pick-up it's your father, he's had a heart attack. He was sitting there watching TV and now the ambulance is coming for him. Oh, God, Lucy, help me, please, what am I going to do? He...I have to...here's the ambulance now please call me Lucy, are you there? Please pick up the phone, Lucy. Oh my God..." Lucy could hear the siren as her mother hung up.

  "Oh no," she burst into tears. "Daddy, daddy, daddy, you shit!" She cried, picking up the phone. She punched in the never-to-be-forgotten number. It rang and rang while she cried. No answer, no machine, Mom and Dad had never had a phone machine, they'd gotten along for forty years with one number, two phones, and no machine, so why get one now? Daddy said that. Daddy drank too much, Lucy hadn't talked to him since December, almost ten months, when she'd gone across the country to be home for the holidays, first time in four years, and he'd fallen off the wagon on Christmas Eve.

  She called a few more times, then gave up; then she called an operator in Portland and asked for the number of the emergency hospital. She was given three numbers and after inquiring at the first as to where Lents District emergency cases were taken, she called that number eleven times in a row and it was busy every time. At last with a soft scream she threw the phone across the room and crawled in to bed. She fell asleep around five. To wake up an hour later, when dawn crept under the window shades, and the first trucks roared past on Broome Street.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN THE SKY FALLS

  Lucy dragged herself out of bed, took a shower, and put on sweat pants and a t-shirt. By the time she sat down with her coffee it was six-fifteen. She began reading galleys again, in search of stray typos, one eye on the clock. She couldn't concentrate. She gave it up, dropping the pages to stare at the time. She didn't dare call Oregon before six a.m. west coast, or Patty before eight. Why was she cursed with the inability to sleep past dawn? At seven she took Claud out for a stroll in the fresh air of early morning, and bought a TIMES. She trudged back up, then sat in the kitchen inhaling caffeine and reading the bad news until 7:45, when the phone rang. She snatched it up. "Hello?"

  "Hello Lucy it's me. Your mother."

  "How is he? Oh M..."

  "He's doing...OK. I mean, he had a massive heart attack, so it's touch and go. The doctors say he'll probably make it."

  "Probably make it? Jesus, Mom, that doesn't sound...You want me to come out? I'll fly out tom..."

  "Oh, there's no need, Lucy. I can take care of him. I don't know what I'll do, but I'll manage. I've managed just fine all these years," she said. Mom the long-suffering, taking satisfaction in her misery. Given the life she led, where else could she find it? Along with Daddy's alcoholic stupor, it was Mom's martyr tones that had driven Lucy out of the house all those years ago.

  Now's not the time for recriminations, bitch! she shouted at herself. "Mom, please...let me...Look, I've got a couple of things to take care of. But I can get out there tomorrow. I want to...you're going to need some help. Dealing with all this I mean."

  "Well, it would...oh, Lord, Lucy," her reserve broke, and with it her voice, and she wailed. "I called dinner and he didn't come and I went in, he was sitting there...I thought he was dead. Lucy, I didn't know what to do." She cried. "I didn't know..."

  "You did the right thing, Mom. You called the ambulance and they came. He's going to be all right now. You did all you could."

  "I suppose so." She sighed. "I've been trying to get him to cut down on the meat and potatoes, get the cholesterol under control, but he...you know how he is, Lucy."

  "Yeah, I know, Mom. Set in his ways." Alcohol and misery did it, not meat, but we don't talk about that.

  "Well, I've got to get some rest, Lucy. I've been up all night. Call back with your arrival time and I'll come get you. He's in Intensive Care in the cardiac wing at Willamette Memorial, so leave a message with the nurses. I'm home now but I'm going back to the hospital in a couple of hours."

  Exhaustion and fear had softened her mother's voice. She sounded vulnerable, and Lucy felt a surge of protective love. "Look, get some rest. I'll see you tomorrow. He's going to be all right, Mom. Just don't worry—not too much anyway. OK?"

  "OK." She sounded calm.

  "That's good, Mom. I love you Mom. Bye now."

  "Bye Lucy," she said.

  Lucy put the phone down, but the image of her mother stayed with her as she went for more coffee; as she started back on the galleys; as she watched the clock: mother and father in the little white house in the Lents District, passing through their time like a couple of regretful ghosts. It was all so damned small! Lucy had so fervently wanted to live in a larger world, and now she did...but every time she talked to Mom, that larger world shrank away, and she was back on pinchy little Maple Northeast, watching the rain come down, wondering with grim, unhappy Mommy when Daddy might get home from the bowling alley bar. The martyr and the drunkard. Mom and Dad.

  She called an airline and booked a flight for eight a.m. the next morning, then called Patricia's. Voicemail answered. Poor Patty, sleeping off another bad night with another bad man. After the beep Lucy said, "Hey hon, got your message, sorry things didn't work out. Wait'll you hear what foolishness I engaged in. Call me back ASAP." Then she called Nina Randolph at her office. Another voicemail. After the chime Lucy put on her perky professional voice and said, "Hi Nina it's Lucy. Parkistan is low-budget, way hip, and will be tough to shoot but if you want hot this is definitely it—the place was swarming with trendsters. I need to go to Oregon tomorrow—family stuff—but I'll call you from there to discuss, and I’m good to go when I get back in a few days. You need an ambience shooter, not a hard-core architectural type. I’ve got time to shoot it. And I would like to write the story. Later."

  She realized she hadn't even mentioned "family stuff" in her message to Patty. She tended to Patty's troubles, Patty didn't have the strength to tend to hers. That was the dynamic between them—so ingrained it came unconsciously. Lucy had her own take on martyrdom.

  She dragged a soft suitcase out of the closet and began packing in a cursory, disorganized fashion. Images of Daddy, bowling alley maintenance man, filled her spaced and weary mind. When she was a kid hanging out at the Timber Lanes, bowling for free seemed pretty cool; later, when the depth of Daddy's bitterness became more evident with each passing, increasingly sodden year, it hadn't been cool at all. He had dreamed of designing rocket engines; instead he repaired automatic pinsetting machines, pinball machines, and later, video games, and blamed Mom for holding him back. Over the years he had learned to blame Lucy, too, for derailing his plans for graduate school. For being there, needing food, shelter, and clothing. Like
it was their fault. People said a big part of growing up was settling, but the one lesson he'd taught her, by example, was that settling was never enough. He could have done it, gone to school and supported them, Mom always offered to work part time, they could have gotten by, but no, Dad chose to piss away the years working a dead end job, getting angry, getting drunk, and then it was too late. With time he'd even learned to blame the machines: Dad, the one-time tech wizard, for years refused to have an answering machine, a VCR, or a microwave in his house. He would have had the phone taken out if Lucy hadn't screamed. Fifteen years old, in a house without a phone! Fat chance, Daddy!

  Enough already! Lucy needed to talk to somebody. Patty Moody, wake up. It's my turn. Be good for you to hear someone else's troubles for a change. After one ring a man answered. "Hello?"

  She was taken aback. "Hi...um...Zane?"

  "No...who's Zane? Who is this?"

  "Who is this?"

  "Bernard Sanderson. Detective. Third Precinct."

  "Detective." Her stomach squinched. "What are...what..."

  "Look, miss...you'd better tell me who..."

  "What happened? Why are you in Patty's apartment? Is she all right?" Lucy's voice rose.

  "Are you...were you acquainted with...Miss Moody?"

  "Were you?" Lucy said tensely. "What happened, goddammit, what happened to Patty? Is she..."

  "I'm sorry, Miss, I 'm not at liberty to..."

  "She's one of my best friends. What happened, please tell me, don't tell me she's..."

  "I'm sorry, but..."

  "Lucy Ripken. My name's Lucy Ripken. I live downtown on Broadway. Patty is my friend. Tell me, please tell me, oh God, what happened, she was...I was with her last night, we..."

  He cut in abruptly. "She was found this morning by a man from her cleaning service. She died of an overdose of drugs—a mix of heroin and cocaine. I think you'd...We need to see you, Miss Ripken. Today."

  "Heroin? Cocaine? What? Patty doesn't do drugs, Mister. She hardly even drinks. She didn't...who told you she was doing drugs, goddammit!"

  "Miss Ripken, we need to see you right away. Stay put. We'll be down there just as soon as we finish up here. It's nearly nine, we'll be there at ten. Where are you?"

  "Corner of Broome and Broadway, SoHo. But listen, please listen: Patty was with a man named Zane Smithson last night. He works at...Fitch Abend, some Wall Street firm. I don't know much about him, but I met him last night. He's forty-fivish, looks like a male model, claims to be a vet, and he said he lives on Park Avenue or was it Fifth, and has a house in the Hamptons."

  "What do you mean "claims?" he said.

  "I don't know...I just got the feeling that something wasn't right with this guy. She's crazy about him, and wanted me to meet him so the three of us had dinner last night. First me and Patty met these three—I should say Patty met these Wall Street guys, you know, yuppie types, and one of them seemed kind of creepy. This was at the Lucky Dog”—Lucy talked fast like maybe she imagined she could outrun time and get back to where Patty was alive—“and I didn’t like these guys at all, and then we met this guy Zane at Cafe Bob, down on Greenwich in Tribeca, and even though he bought me dinner and a lot of fancy wine, he rubbed me the wrong way. God, I can't believe Patty falls for these...she's never gonna learn is she?" She babbled, trying to hold on. "Then he left and Patty and I went to Parkistan, you know, the new nightclub over on Tompkins Square, till around one. Then she said she had to get home because she and this Zane, Zane Smithson, were going to meet up at her place at two. I stayed out late and when I got home it was after four and there was a message from her—she sounded upset—saying he had been there and...I don't know what he did, but she sounded pretty bad. The message is still…I'll save it if you want."

  "That would be good," he said.

  When he didn't say anything else she went on. "That's all I know about him. He seemed to know a lot of famous people. He knew the owner of the cafe—a guy named Maurizio. Plus he didn't strike me as a doper, but..." she paused.

  "You never know these days, do you?"

  "I guess not. But he was really vain, and dope...when you get older, anyway...can mess up your health." She stared out the window, imagining the shape of her world without Patty in it. "So...um...now what do I do..." She felt a kind of anxious terror rising in her throat.

  "Sit tight. I'm gonna put somebody on this Smithson character, finish up here, see if I can get anywhere with your yuppies from the bar, and then I'll be down to see you. You remember any names?”

  “Just first names. Phil, and John, and…Dan. Phil was the creepy one. Patty gave him her card, with her name and address.”

  “Hmm. Not too wise.”

  “No. But Patty was…boy-crazy.”

  “I see. Well. That’s it for now I guess. And Miss Ripken?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You're sure about the drug thing? With Patty I mean?"

  "Yes. She was boy-crazy, like I said, but she wasn't a doper. Take it from me, I used to do cocaine on occasion like everybody I knew, but Patty never did. She had allergies and it was too hard on her sinuses."

  "OK. Miss Ripken...stay put, don't let anyone in, I'll be there soon as I can. Broome and Broadway, right?"

  "Southeast corner. You'll have to shout up, I don't have a buzzer. I'll drop you a key in a sock."

  "What?"

  "There's no buzzer and I'm on the fifth floor. I have to drop you a key to open the front door. I'll look out for you at ten so you won't have to yell up, OK?" Lucy hung up the phone, numbness settling over her. Patty...dead?! Did that slimy-smooth operator Zane Smithson dope her up and fuck her and leave her to die? Or could it have been Phil, that psycho banker from the bar? What happened? Smack and coke. A speedball, they called it. She'd never seen Patty do more than drink a glass or two of wine, even in the days when coke was everywhere. Oh God, what happened? Lucy stared at her suitcase. How could she go to Portland...but how could she not go, with Daddy in the hospital? "Oh, Claud," she said, falling on the bed, where the dog lay watching her, all worried eyes. "What am I going to do?" She cried, burying her face in the dog's soft white curls.

  After while she got up and called Harold Ipswich, but he was still out of the country, the useless cur. She changed into more presentable clothes, and made fresh coffee, and re-read the paper. When she opened a window and looked out at ten, Sanderson and his partner were standing on the sidewalk in front of her building, looking up. Lascovich the landlord stood by, glaring up at her. Lucy dropped the sock containing keys, hoping the cops wouldn't tell Landlord anything. He didn't need to know.

  Two minutes later she let them in. Sanderson was a handsome black man in his forties dressed in a dark green suit that looked too expensive for a cop on the job. His partner was named Riles, a freckled, red-haired, thirty-fivish Irishman with booze in his eyes and a cheap sports coat on his back. He was gasping for air, like the five flights of stairs he'd just climbed were the north face of a major peak. As soon as he got his breath he pulled out a cigarette, and Lucy had to tell him not to smoke in her house. He put it away with a disgusted look. The last time cops had been in her house, they had come to hear about her three cameras that had been stolen. No one had ever been arrested, and the cameras had never been recovered. But those had been local cops bored with another loft robbery. These two were uptown cops with a dead beauty on their hands.

  Not just a run-of-the-mill dead beauty, either. First, Lucy played the message back. Then, over coffee at Lucy's big yellow kitchen table, they ran some mug sheets by her. Zane Smithson's pretty face didn't turn up. But one of the mugs was the creepy-eyed guy from the trio Patty had been flirting it up with at the Lucky Dog. He was Philip Santucci, and he once had been arrested for assaulting his ex-wife. The charges had been dropped, but still. They’d have to have another look.

  Regarding Zane Smithson the cops had made some calls. He didn't work at Fitch Abend; he wasn't a vet; nor did he own a house in the Hamptons or a co-op on Park Avenue or
Fifth. A cipher. "But what about all the famous people he knew at the restaurant?" Lucy said.

  "Ever see Zelig, that Woody Allen movie?" Sanderson said. "You know, where this little nowhere guy keeps popping up next to..."

  "Yeah. I see your point." She remembered how Smithson had greeted all the celebs: to DeNiro: "Hey Bobby how ya doin'? Zane Smithson here, how's it goin’?" He'd given his own name to every last one of them because—it was obvious now—nobody knew his name.

  "Lucy," Sanderson said, waxing solemn. "There's something you should...know about this situation. We're, ah...listen, I know you were friends with Patricia, but I..." he paused.

  "What?" Lucy said. "What is it?"

  "C'mon, Bernie," Riles snapped, exasperated. "Just tell her."

  "Shutup, Riles," Sanderson said. "Look. We don't...we're not sure Miss Moody was murdered."

  Lucy took it in for a few seconds. For an instant, she'd thought they meant she was still alive. No. "What makes you say that?"

  "Did she ever say anything to you about...any of the stuff she did...with her boyfriends, I mean?"

  "What are you talking about? What did you..."

  "She was tied up," Riles jumped in. "Bare ass naked and tied to a chair."

  "What?"

  Sanderson picked up where Riles left off. "There were no marks on her. No signs of a struggle. It was one of two matching chairs. She was sitting in the chair, tied with silk ropes, dead of a drug overdose. The cleaning man that found her had his own key. They were friends, he said."

  "Some little faggot," said Riles.

  "Shutup," said Sanderson.

  "So what, you think she..."

  "There were pictures," Riles added with a barely contained smirk. 'In a drawer. Of her, tied up other times. She was a pretty kinky lady, whether you knew it or not."

  "Look, I don't know anything about bondage," Lucy lied. Patty had once told her that she liked getting tied up. "Patty's sex life is her business. All I know is that she would never take hard drugs."