"Angelique," I said, as much to remind myself as to pull away from Lizette's instantaneous charms.
Mrs. Lear smiled, downed the second glass, and tossed her mouse-brown hair.
"She's an amazing human being," she said. "Pretty, smart, certain about what she wants. And she always gets it."
Lizette poured a third drink.
"Do you know where she is?" I asked.
"No. No, I don't. But you can be sure that wherever she is she's another step closer to something else she wants."
You couldn't help but note the jealousy in her words.
"You aren't worried that she's missing?"
"Not at all." She finished the third shot and poured another.
"Angie makes silk from straw, sows' ears, and bad boyfriends. . . . If I wasn't a good Christian I'd say she was a witch. She doesn't approve of me. Doesn't like my drinking. Blames me for her father leaving."
"Where is her father?" There was no mention of him in Rinaldo's files.
"I don't know," Lizette said, gazing up at the ceiling. She was rounding pretty and making a run for beautiful. "He rolled into my life, made me jump for joy, and then was gone before I hit the ground. Angelique doesn't have an ounce of him, and less than a pound of me, in her makeup. She has an old soul, that one."
"Do you know her boyfriend?"
"Johnny," Lizette said with a smile. The mention of this new name brought her into full blossom.
"I thought his name was Shad. Shad Tandy."
"Shad Tandy?" It was as if I'd shoved a sour lemon against her teeth. "He's just a momentary mistake for my girl. Her true love is a young man named John Prince. He's an architect. Probably walks on water, too. He and Angie break up now and again, but they always get back together."
"Do you have a number for him?" I asked.
"Sure." She finished her fourth shot, stood up, none too steady, and lumbered toward a door.
While she was gone I allowed myself a smile. There was no John Prince mentioned in Rinaldo's files. I liked that. It let me feel that I had a leg up on the Big Man.
When she returned, Mrs. Lear had forsaken the off-white dress for a flimsy robe. She was only in her forties, after all. She liked drinks, and men; I represented both.
"I can't seem to find it. Must have thrown it out in one of my cleaning binges. But you can probably look it up."
"Do you know where he works?" I asked as she slumped back into her chair.
"For an architectural firm. I'm sorry . . . I don't know which one."
"That's okay."
"You haven't touched your drink," Lizette chided.
"On the job," I said. "What do you do for a living, ma'am?"
"Lizette."
"What do you do for a living, Lizette?"
"I haven't had a job for a while, Mr. Tooms. What's your first name?"
"John."
"I haven't had a job in a while, John. My nerves, you know. Angie helps me out with the rent, and she has groceries delivered every Monday and Thursday. She doesn't give me any cash, though. If I want a cigarette I have to bum one on the street."
"She must do very well at her job."
"She told me that someone gave her a grant or something, and she's using part of that to help me. You'd think she could give me a few bucks, though. A bottle of wine now and then isn't such a sin. . . .
"Maybe you and me could go out for a little swizzle."
"Maybe some other time," I said, rising to my feet.
"Do you have to go already?"
"I need to find your daughter."
"Angie's fine. She's like a cat."
Lizette wanted to stand up but her body wasn't accommodating the desire.
"Will you come back again?"
"When I find Angie I'll come back and tell you."
"Angie," Lizette said with a sneer.
As I went out the door I heard her mutter, "Bitch."
21
It wasn't much after eight when I left Lizette's hungry cave. From there my feet took me down the street to the Naked Ear.
The Ear was busier that evening. Large groups of young and not so young people hovered around the bar, drinking and talking, laughing and trying to get the bartender's attention.
I wedged my solid bulk between two women in identical blue dresses, said Excuse me to a man who was laughing so hard that he couldn't take a sip from his glass.
Finally I sidled up to the bar next to a middle-aged man who was reading The New York Times.
"Anything happening?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said, refusing to look at me. "Everybody's waiting for January twentieth like early Christians waiting for the end of time."
There are very few rules I adhere to. In my line of work you can't let something from yesterday keep you from right now. But one thing I never do is talk politics with strangers in bars.
"You're McGill, right?" a woman said.
The bartender that night had black hair and shocking cobalt eyes. She'd been the runner-up to beauty her entire life, but the judges always left the party with her.
"Cynthia," I said, reaching back into my memory.
"Cylla," she said. "You were close."
"Not bartender close."
"Lucy said to tell you that she had to take off tonight but she'd be back on duty tomorrow."
I felt the twinge of unrequited infatuation where instinct told me my heart was.
"Three cognacs, right?" Cylla said.
"Yeah."
"Find a seat and I'll bring them to you."
THE OUTER CIRCLE OF the bar was never heavily inhabited, even on the busiest nights. When the Ear got going, ninety percent of the clientele thronged around the bar like youngsters in a mosh pit.
I found a small round table near a couple of young smoochers. Their love transported them. The beers were glasses of red wine and the table was outside on the Champs-Elysees en ete.
Ignoring the lovers, I tried to understand the life of Angelique Tara Lear. Her boyfriend had betrayed her. Her mother, whom she supported, called her a bitch. Her friend had been murdered, maybe in her stead, and the most powerful man in New York seemed to be obsessed with her every move and acquaintance. Few people did that much living in an entire decade.
My phone made the sound of Chinese wind chimes.
"Hey, Zephrya. Guess where I am."
"Looks like the Naked Ear."
" 'Looks like'?"
"You got the GPS turned on on your phone again," she said. "I could tell you exactly where you were in Beijing or Timbuktu."
Zephyra Ximenez was my lifeline in the electronic dimensions. I rarely saw her. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of her work was on the phone or online. She had a Dominican mother and Moroccan father--lineages, when combined, that gave her dark red-black skin and the kind of look that defines rather than trails after beauty. I had met her at the Ear and tried to pick her up, but she didn't have a father complex. When I told her about my work she offered me her professional services.
In the long run that was a much better deal for both of us.
"The police are after you, Mr. McGill," she said.
"Say what?"
"Lieutenant Bonilla--the last time I talked to her she was a sergeant--and Detective Kitteridge have both called and demanded your presence."
"What did you tell them?"
"That I would pass the information on as soon as possible."
"I hired a receptionist," I said. "A young woman named Mardi Bitterman."
"Really? Wow. With me, Bug Bateman, and now this Mardi, you almost have a real office."
"Yeah. From now on you can call her during business hours when you can't get me."
"Your drinks," Cylla said.
She had brought them on an old-fashioned dark-brown tray that was lined with cork.
"Is that Cylla?" Zephyra asked.
"It is."
"Let me speak to her a minute, will you, boss?"
While the young women chattered, I took my fi
rst nip of brandy and wondered at the zinging feeling in my chest. It made me happy to see Cylla laughing with Zephyra. I wanted the same youthful abandon for Angie but didn't have high hopes.
I LEFT THE BAR about midnight and walked for a while. I honestly didn't realize that I was headed for Lucy's block until I was standing there in front of her building.
The light was on in her apartment. There was jazz coming from somewhere else. I was a teenager, drunk on his first forbidden bender and smitten with passion for a girl.
At my age this feeling was better than love. It was the moment before you really knew the object of affection. Her nipples and the sounds she made in her sleep were still in the province of the unknown. She had no secrets because she was, in herself, a mystery. I had no hold on her because she hadn't yet offered me one.
Standing outside her place, I had two choices: one of them was to ring her bell.
I took out my phone, disengaged the GPS, and entered a number.
"Lieutenant Bonilla," she answered on the third ring.
"You wanted to see me, Lieutenant?"
WE MET AT A little after-hours joint on Eighty-first. The bar closed at one but the owner stayed open for cops and special regulars.
Bonilla was already there when I arrived. She was sitting in a faded red booth, wearing a steel-gray pants suit that had a definite masculine flair.
I sat down across from her and nodded.
"Have you talked to Kitteridge?" were her first words.
"Not since a while ago. He wanted me to come in this afternoon but I demurred."
"You know, you shouldn't take Carson lightly."
The lady cop was offering me good advice. She was intuitive, working outside the rote demands of her profession. She understood that there was a conflict going on in me.
Carson Kitteridge was the only innately honest senior cop I had ever dealt with. It was in his job definition to bring me to justice, whatever that meant. For all that, he played by the rules. He would never take somebody down except by the letter of the law. But Bethann Bonilla was even more rare. She had empathy for me; no love, or even real concern, just a feeling for what I was.
"What do you have on the murders, Mr. McGill?"
"I'm not on that case, Lieutenant. I don't even know what the papers say about it because I haven't had the time to sit down and read them."
"What are you working on?"
"Nothing criminal."
"Does it have to do with Wanda Soa?"
"Not that I know of."
"Then what were you doing at her apartment?"
"I've already explained that."
"Do you expect me to believe that you haven't wondered?"
"Listen," I said. "If you come to work tomorrow and nobody in the city has committed a crime, you still get paid. You could get shot in the leg and have to take six months off and they will send you a check every two weeks. I, on the other hand, have to sweat over every dollar. I don't have time to worry about some woman who called me. I don't have the luxury to be inquisitive."
"This case has Charbon very worried," she said.
That was a threat. Captain James Charbon was oil on my water. He was my own personal ton of bricks. Kitteridge just wanted me in the jail; James Charbon wanted me under it.
"What is it you're trying to get from me?" I asked. I had to.
"Anything you know."
"Okay. I want you to listen to me. I had never heard of that woman before you told me her name. I got a call but I can't be expected to identify a dead woman's voice. Maybe if you explain to me the problem I could try to find out what you need."
"There's nothing but problems. Soa's apartment was party central. We lifted eighty-six different prints from the living room alone. On the walls, on the floors, under the couch. Women and men, maybe even children. Prints everywhere but on the knife. It was wiped off with some kind of cloth that we didn't find at the scene. The gun was gone, too."
"Do you have a scenario of how the man was killed?"
"We figure that the John Doe was pointing the gun at Wanda when someone blindsided him, stabbing him in the chest. Problem was the gun went off, killing the girl. The killer fell dead right after."
"And," I continued, "the second killer wiped their prints off the haft and then took the pistol . . . maybe for protection."
"That's how we see it. The guy was a professional. No ID. He didn't even have labels in his clothes."
"Not much to go on," I said.
"And if I don't come up with something you can bet that Captain Charbon will dump it on you."
"If anything comes up," I said, "anything at all, I will tell either you or Carson."
"It's my case."
"Then I'll tell you."
22
It was after two when I got home. I couldn't imagine subjecting myself to the test of the stairs, so I took the elevator and opened the front door quietly, hung the hideous yellow suit on the rack in my den, and then lay down on the daybed, sighing like a black bear on the first day of hibernation. I'd only had five little glasses of cognac, but at my age, and at that hour, it was enough to make the world around me jiggle and spin--on the verge of flying apart.
Bonilla presented me with a serious problem that I identified with my seemingly permanent headache.
Captain James Charbon didn't like the stink of me. He was a hardworking official who had many open cases, and so most of the time he left me alone. But when there was an investigation on his desk--one that had my name anywhere attached--he became hell-bent on getting me charged with something, anything.
This passion was brought about by extraordinary conceit.
When Charbon was a detective working the street he prided himself on a nearly perfect success rate.
I was the one exception.
A woman I knew named Lana Stride had been indicted for her involvement in the murder of a Park Avenue psychiatrist. She was guilty, the police said, of finding and giving to Brooks Sanders the name of the mental-health professional who had persuaded Brooks's wife to seek a divorce. If Lana had considered her actions she would have probably known what Brooks would do. But Lana was a lush and didn't remember what she'd done.
Sammy Stride, Lana's brother, offered me $2,500 to find Lana an alibi. It just so happened that I had once done a barely legal job for a state senator who Lana told me she knew when she was a cocktail hostess. Using the chit for a job done gratis, I asked the good legislator to tell the police, on behalf of our mutual acquaintance, that he was with her on the afternoon that Brooks had said she told him about the shrink and his wife.
State senator trumps confessed murderer 12,341 times to 1.
The senior officer on the case, James Charbon, had been looking to return the favor for seven years. From the moment he found out, from Carson Kitteridge, that I was a close confidant of Lana's brother, he made it a lifelong goal to hobble me.
Luckily I was mildly inebriated and exhausted from a frustrating day of weak leads, so Charbon felt like a faraway threat that could be managed--later.
I turned on my side.
The killing of Wanda Soa was a mistake, but it was professional, still and all. The killer had been paid by somebody. And that somebody, I was pretty sure, was not Alphonse Rinaldo. It could have been a man named Grant, who paid good money to Shad Tandy, but maybe not. Grant could have been working for Rinaldo. He might have gotten the address to be passed on to me.
I closed my eyes and lay deathlike in my wife-beater and boxers. I thought about Lizette Lear leaving her house every night for some neighborhood bar where there were cigarettes and men and alcohol, all variables in an equation that often altered but never changed.
After a night of carousing, Lizette would find herself coming back to consciousness in a hospital, the drunk tank, or, if it was a lucky night, maybe she'd awaken to nausea in her own bed. But whenever she opened her eyes, Angie would be there to wipe her face and hold her hand.
I so closely identified with t
he feeling that I opened my eyes to break the hermeneutic connection.
Katrina was sitting next to me in a chair that she must have pulled up. I hadn't heard the movement. I had been dreaming, not thinking.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Bad dream," I said.
"Why are you sleeping out here, Leonid?"
"I didn't, I didn't want to wake you."
"How do you feel?"
I sat up, experiencing a host of physical symptoms: my hands were hot, feet cold, head still hurt, and my stomach felt like a child's balloon filled with water and ready to burst.
"I'm just fine," I said.
Neither of us spoke for a time. I could hear the folding alarm clock ticking on my desk. Those were the seconds of my life creeping sideways into a vast unknown.
"I'm worried about Dimitri," Katrina said. She was worried about a lot of things, but our brooding son was always the most important.
"Not Twill?" I asked.
"Don't bait me, Leonid."
"Twilliam is the one risking getting thrown back into kid jail in order to be with his brother," I said. "He's the one taking chances."
"Dimitri is your son." It was the closest she'd ever come to admitting Twill and Shelly were other men's offspring.
"I have to lie down."
"I'm going to call the police."
"And what will you tell them?"
"That our son is missing."
"I spoke to him today."
"He hasn't talked to me."
"If you call the cops the least that will happen is that Twill will be sent back to juvie. If they're into something shaky, they both might go."
"Dimitri is a good boy," Katrina intoned.
"He's with Twill, honey, and you know what Twill is like."
Silence reigned for a while. I put a hot hand on my cold, bald, aching head.
"Come to bed," Katrina said, capitulating.
"I don't think that's a very good idea. Let me just lie back down here and I promise I will get your son to call you as soon as possible, hopefully tomorrow."
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