“Thanks. The scout?”
“Oh, right. It was Oz Puriefoy.”
Oz. Short for Oscar Puriefoy, one of the men at the party.
Lindqvist looked at me strangely. “If you need to talk to Oz, George will have a number for him.”
“Thanks. Did you ever meet any of Mau Tim’s family?”
“Never did. That’s what I meant about it being tough to give you any background on her. She was over eighteen when Oz sent over her test shots and she first signed on with us, so she didn’t need parental permission.”
“You ever speak to them by telephone?”
“Her parents, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No.” Lindqvist seemed to think a moment, her eyes flitting left-right-left without focusing on anything. “No, I think the only person I ever talked to was an uncle. On the telephone. I think he owned the building she lived in.”
“Vincent Dani?”
“Maybe. I know she changed her name.”
“From ‘Tina’ to ‘Mau Tim’?”
“No. No, originally it was even more ethnic—‘Amatina,’ that was it. I wanted to change it to ‘Violeta,’ for the eyes and all, but there was already a black model with a name like that. Then I think she checked on the Vietnamese word for ‘violet,’ and it turned out to be ‘mau tim,’ which fit her beautifully.”
“Do you know how I could reach her parents?”
“No, but their number might be in her file.”
“Her file here?”
“Right. It would have places where we could reach her, that kind of thing. Might have some family stuff, but can’t you just get that from the police?”
I thought about Holt. “Maybe, thanks. I take it you didn’t go to the funeral, then.”
“No. No, we didn’t. I think George called the uncle, but he said—the uncle said that the family wanted to keep it closed. The funeral I mean, not the … well, maybe that, too. I’ve never … I’ve never seen anybody strangled before. I don’t know what it does to … the features.”
Lindqvist spoke more carefully than emotionally about it. Like she wanted to use the right words, not that she was upset by discussing violent death.
“Did Mau Tim ever talk with you about her personal life?”
“No. No, she really didn’t, John. We talked a little once about what growing up in an ethnic Swedish family was like, but—you see, quite a lot of the girls see me as kind of a big sister.”
“Somebody they can confide in?”
“Yes, but not Mau Tim.”
“Independent?”
“More … insulated. I think growing up Amerasian must have given her some problems. I don’t mean while she was working. She could be dazzling on a shoot. I mean more that she kept her personal side to herself.”
“Might she have confided more in your partner?”
“George?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I doubt it. Maybe Sinead, though if you meet her, you’ll never see why.”
“She the model who was having the party?”
“Right. Sinead Fagan. George can give you her number, too. Only, don’t release it, okay?”
“Release it?”
“Yes. Some of the girls use the agency as their number and address to screen out the creeps.”
“Models get approached a lot?”
“You bet. Even agencies like this one have to avoid them.”
“Like by no sign out front.”
“Right. And by being on the fourth floor instead of street level. If they could spot us from the sidewalk, every pervert with an Instamatic would be in here, trying to hire ‘nude models’ for ‘private photo sessions.’ ”
“Did Mau Tim ever have any problems with ‘creeps,’ Erica?”
“Not that I know of. I think she would have told me that.”
I nodded. “Who decided to take out the policy on her?”
“We both did.”
“You and Yulin.”
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was it to start with?”
Lindqvist watched me very carefully. “Should I be thinking about my lawyer now?”
“Same answer as before.”
She paused. “It was George’s idea.”
“You have policies on any of your other models?”
“No. We thought about it on a guy a few years ago, but he moved to New York.”
“And on to another agency?”
Another pause. “Yes.”
“Any reason you applied for half a million?”
“It seemed like a good number at the time. Believe me, John, Mau Tim was a rising star about to become a superstar. There was nobody quite like her. Two years from now, that policy would have been for two million dollars and every model in the country would be showing up at test shoots with violet contact lenses.”
“Would she still be worth that to you by then?”
“Mau Tim wasn’t going anywhere.”
My turn to pause. “I didn’t mean to imply that she was. I just meant since Mau Tim was nineteen now, she’d be ‘past-prime’ in another two years.”
Lindqvist brought out the good smile again. “You’re very … accomplished at this, aren’t you, John?”
“I’ve been doing it a long time. You get lucky.”
“First, Mau Tim wasn’t going to leave our agency. She’d heard quite a lot about how you have to go to New York to hit the megabucks, but she was loyal to us. Second, Mau Tim was an exception to the rule-of-nineteen. She would have been sensational for a long time to come.”
“All right. Mind telling me where you were a week ago Friday?”
A darkening. “When Mau Tim was killed?”
“Yes.”
The eyes flitted again. “Upstairs? Yes.”
“Upstairs?”
“I have the penthouse unit in this building. I was catching up on some paperwork.”
“Alone.”
“Unfortunately.”
“On a Friday night.”
Lindqvist traced an index finger from her throat to her navel. “All dressed up and no place to go.”
I shook my head. “Anything else you can think of?”
“Yes. Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”
I folded my pad. “That’s pretty fast.”
“This business moves pretty fast, John.” Her eyes went to the ceiling. “The penthouse has a great deck. Barbecue for two?”
I stood. “Thanks, Erica, but I’m already taken.” The beaming smile. “The best always are, John. The trick is learning how to take them away.”
Six
GEORGE YULIN’S DOOR WAS half-open. I rapped on it. He looked up and waved me in before I realized he was on the telephone.
His office was more modest than Erica Lindqvist’s. The one window gave him a view of the alley and parking area of the buildings on the south side of Commonwealth Avenue. The “codirector’s” guest furniture consisted of uncomfortable director’s chairs. His desk had a fax, calculator, and computer also, but there were dozens of magazines strewn over it and the floor nearby, most of them with I guess a fifteen- to nineteen-year-old puckering for the cover.
Into the receiver, Yulin was saying, “Yes, Melanie, it’s George … Well, I wouldn’t have to be calling you if you checked in like you were supposed to, now would I? … Yes, well, we all have a rough night from time to time. The trick is not to let it ruin our days. Or our looks, right? … Yes, I’ve got something for you. Lingerie catalog, should be lots of—No, your hair is fine the way it is. Clean-shaven … Yes, of course ‘down there, too.’ How long have you been living off this dodge, Melanie? … Probably Wednesday next week, maybe into Thursday … Yes, well, how’s your period been the last three … All right, all right. If it isn’t, call me at least twenty-four before the shoot, got it? … Yes, love you, too.”
Yulin hung up. “The fucking cunt!”
I decided to play along. “One of your favorites?”
“You have no idea, Mr.—tell me, now that you’ve heard me use foul language, can we call each other by first names?”
Just like Lindqvist. “Sure, George.”
“Well, John, models have egos the size of their bottoms rather than their brains. They love the glamour and the travel—when they work, that is, which might be only two or three days a week. They have time off like a stewardess and get paid like a company president. Plus all the stroking, the wining and dining, propositioned by every Platinum Card in sight. But no matter how many great spreads you get them, a lot of the girls are so unappreciative, so bitchy, it drives you up a wall.”
“Was Mau Tim like that?”
“Mau Tim? Oh, right. No, no, she was pretty professional, actually. A good kid, if a little quiet.”
“Erica led me to believe that Mau Tim was on the verge of stardom.”
Yulin leaned back in his chair, combing the fingers of his right hand through the grizzly-bear hair over his ear. “Are we going to play lawyer/witness here, or can you just ask me questions?”
Maybe Yulin had a little more juice than I thought. “Erica said something about a file and a book you kept on Mau Tim?”
“Sure. Just a second.”
Yulin left the office for maybe twenty seconds, coming back carrying a yellow suspended folder and a six-inch by nine-inch loose-leaf album. He handed me the folder and set the album on the desk near me. Then he pulled over another director’s chair so we were sitting side by side.
“Why don’t you just go through the file, John? I can give you a running commentary on it.”
“Fine.”
I opened the folder. There was a cover sheet with MAU TIM (DANI) and date of birth at the top.
Yulin said, “That’s the casting card.”
“How come her last name is in parentheses?”
“Because she goes by her first name professionally. A lot of the girls do.”
“Why?”
“They think it’s sexier. Also, it keeps the creeps from finding out who they are and where they live.”
Lindqvist had already taken me down that road. I pointed to a smattering of telephone numbers, some of which had been lined through and others arrowed in. “What are all these?”
“The places we can reach her. Sorry, could reach her. Sometimes a job will crop up after a model’s called in for the day.”
“Why so many numbers?”
“Well, some are out of date. The ones with arrows are more recent.”
“Can you tell me which numbers went with which times?”
Yulin craned over my arm. “That first number was her uncle’s, I think. He’s a lawyer, downtown. The second is Oz Puriefoy’s. He’s the photographer who scouted her.” Yulin looked up at me. “Who sent her to us in the first place.”
“Right. But they’re scratched out.”
“All that means is she got her own place.”
“Meaning she used to live with her uncle, then with Puriefoy?”
Yulin gave me a knowing grin. “Mau Tim was the sort of girl who could probably live anywhere she wanted.”
I said, “You know these numbers by heart?”
“Not anymore. Just the current ones. But you call them so many times, you remember which one was which, you know?”
I pointed back down to the card. “How about these two newer entries in the margin?”
“That one’s the number at her apartment.” Yulin dropped his voice. “Where she was killed.”
“And the number in red?”
“That’s Larry Shinkawa.”
“The police said he was one of the men at the party.”
“I’m not surprised. Mau Tim and Larry have been … They were a thing for some months before she died.”
“He’s in advertising, right?”
“An exec at one of the smaller agencies.”
“Advertising agency?”
“Right. Berry/Ryder. Just down the street.”
“Do you know how they met?”
Yulin gave me a funny look. “I introduced them, as a matter of fact. At a party we threw at the Cactus Club.”
A trendy bar around the corner on Boylston Street. I went back to the card. Mau Tim’s height, weight, bust, waist, hips, dress size, shoe size, and so on. I picked up from the file a black-and-white pamphlet the size of a big birthday card. It had a head-and-shoulders photo of Mau Tim on the cover, an elaborate necklace around her throat and her first name emblazoned at the bottom.
Yulin said, “That’s a comp, for ‘composite card.’ ”
“You sent this out as kind of a brochure for her?”
“Right.” Yulin opened it up. Inside were two more photos of Mau Tim, one in evening wear, one in lingerie. On the back was a long shot of her in a wool dress and heels, boutique shopping bags in hand, apparently trying to flag a taxi. Alive, the most arresting woman I’d ever seen in two dimensions.
Yulin said, “Breathtaking, wasn’t she?”
I looked at him.
He blinked and said, “The next thing in the file is—”
“Just a second. You have a color version of that photo on the front?”
“Probably in the mini-book. You want to go through it now?”
“In a minute.” I turned the comp card sideways to pick up the names of the photographers given credit in the margins. “None of these was taken by this Puriefoy.”
“Oh, no. No, she graduated from old Oz, if you get my drift.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Oz is a good photographer. With a good eye for talent, like hitting on Mau Tim, for example. But he’s not a great photographer. She got to be too good for him.”
“Can that happen with agencies like yours as well?”
Yulin clenched his jaw, then relaxed it quickly. “It can. But Mau Tim knew what we’d done for her. She wasn’t going anywhere we didn’t take her.”
I looked back into the file. There were some advertisement photos from newspapers. Only a few months old, from the dates handwritten on them, but already yellowing. There were also some studio shots of Mau Tim, with Oz Puriefoy’s name as photo credit.
“What are these?”
Yulin said, “Those are old shots that we rotated out of Mau Tim’s mini-book. See what I mean about Oz’s work?”
Mau Tim did look less sophisticated, less well turned in the face and hair. I couldn’t have attributed that to the photographer as opposed to the model, but then, I wasn’t in the business.
“I don’t see any paycheck stubs or tax records in here.”
“That’s all on the computer now.”
“What did Mau Tim pull down in a year?”
“I could look it up for you, but basically she went from a thousand a day to two within a few months. Lately we were getting twenty-five hundred guaranteed.”
“A day.”
“Right.”
“From which your cut was?”
The jaw clenched again. “Twenty-five percent. Standard in the industry.”
Six-twenty-five a day to Lindqvist/Yulin. “And how many days a week did Mau Tim work?”
“We could have gotten her six if she wanted, but usually four, sometimes five. You see, she could pose for one photographer during the day, another on a small job at night with a guaranteed half-day rate for the smaller job.”
“So be conservative and call it two hundred days a year. That means she’d earn a hundred and a quarter a year for you in commissions.”
Yulin lifted his chin a little. “No, John. We earned that money. By placing her in good shoots that paid top dollar for her.”
“Had you placed her in a shoot that day?”
“That … ? Oh, you mean the day she died. No.”
“You don’t have to look it up?”
“No. I’m positive. She’d told me in no uncertain terms that Saturday was her birthday. She wasn’t working Friday or the weekend.”
“She call in that Friday?”
Yulin shut his e
yes, then said, “Yes. As usual.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning midafternoon.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Two, three?”
“She seem worried to you?”
“No. We talked about a job two weeks down the line. In Jamaica for a casino. She seemed very up for it.”
A knock at the door. Yulin said, “Yes?”
Erica Lindqvist stuck her head in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, George, but Larry Shin is on the phone from the airport, and I’ve got to run. Can you take it?”
“Certainly, Erica.”
She nodded and left. Yulin had said “certainly” like a bank teller asked to count out a thousand dollars in singles.
The man stood. “Excuse me, John.” He went behind his desk and picked up his telephone. By the time he pushed the button on the console, his voice had a “how can I serve” lilt to it.
“Larry! Great to hear from you, Chief. How goes it? … Right, right. Give me what you … Right, blonde and redhead. The blonde? … Young Christie Brinkley, sexy, lots of energy. Got it. The red? … Firm breasts, cup no bigger than 34C … No taller than five ten? … Oh, right, right. He’s just barely six feet. Okay … What? Oh, shit no, Larry. We’ve got a drawerful of them. Any leg shots on the redhead? … No, that will narrow it a little, but let me see if the one I have in mind … Right, right. I will. Thanks, Larry.”
Yulin hung up, took a breath, then came back to me.
I said, “Larry Shinkawa?”
“Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact.”
I didn’t say anything more. Yulin asked if there was anything else.
“The mini-book?”
“Oh, right.” He retrieved the album from the desk and gave it to me, again taking the chair next to me.
I turned plastic sleeves of Mau Tim in swimwear, sportswear, and yachtwear. It was hard to just flip through them. There was something about each that really caught the eye, like fine paintings of the same subject by different artists. None by Puriefoy.
Then I hit the head-and-shoulders shot of Mau Tim and the necklace in full color. The purple stones lay perfectly symmetrically around the throat, the pendant weighing the least bit heavily toward the cleavage that the dressline suggested but the photo didn’t show. Eyes and necklace glittered in whatever light the photographer had shone on her.
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