I thought it was about time I got a word in, so, rather than answering, I asked, “Whatever happened to Jimmy Stone?”
“Poor Jimmy,” she said, contemplating the glowing tip of the cigarette. “He joined the army. He said they would draft him anyway, so he signed up, and he was probably very good at being a soldier because he was very brave—quite stupid, really—and very well endowed. I can vouch for that. He wanted me to marry him, poor darling, but I didn’t fancy that sort of life—would you? Shopping for diapers at the PX, nights out in downtown Wiesbaden with the warrant officers’ wives…Anyway, they sent Jimmy to Korea. He stepped on a landmine and his balls were blown off. A loss to womankind. By then, I’d moved on. I got a job in the big city—Cleveland—with a divinely boring insurance company. And I met a boy there who was frightfully clever at managing risk, if you know what I mean, and he said I should enter this beauty pageant. I told him not to be a silly, but he told me that, if I won, it would be my insurance policy. And—surprise, surprise—I did win, and because of that I met all kinds of interesting and unusual people. By unusual I mean people with unusual needs. And then I got married to Gabe and we moved to the Apple, though we still have a sweet little mansion in Shaker Heights. See, darling, now you know my entire life story.”
She stubbed the cigarette out angrily in the ashtray and just sat there, staring at me through the Ray-Bans. I asked her to take them off.
“Screw you,” she said.
I told her that when I’m talking to someone, I like to see their eyes. Otherwise, we might just as well talk on the phone.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say to a lady,” she said, smoothing her skirt.
“Do you wear them when you haven’t been crying?” I asked.
“Only when I want to be invisible.”
“That must be a tough trick to pull off.”
“You do realize,” she said, “that you’re talking to the wife of your current employer?”
“I kind of thought so. It’s fairly unusual for women who look like they stepped out of the social pages to drop by my office to tell me the story of their life. Even if they cut it short right after the interesting part about meeting people with unusual needs.”
She took off the glasses and glared at me angrily.
“I presume you were trying to let me know you were one of the boys,” I said. “Or should I say one of the girls? I don’t know why, but I thought maybe that was your intention.”
Her expression softened.
“I was nervous,” she said. “I talk too much when I’m nervous.”
Her eyes were rimmed with red, which expertly applied makeup had failed to hide.
“So, shall we start again?” I asked.
“My husband told me he’d hired you,” she said. “I thought I’d look you over.”
The affected delivery had vanished.
“Disappointed?”
“What I told you is true,” she said. “I’ve done my turn in offices like this.”
“But you were hoping for something fancier?”
“Don’t put words into my mouth, Mr. Novalis. Knowing Gabe, I thought he’d hire someone with a cute secretary, a Brooks Brothers suit, and a shitload of certificates on the wall. I’m kind of pleasantly surprised.”
“Maybe he wants to get the job done.”
“Oh, he wants to get the job done. He wants to put Lydia back in the ivory tower he built for her, and have Jerry Pedrosian’s balls on toast for breakfast. That’s if I don’t get to the bastard first.”
“You know Pedrosian?” I prompted.
“I know the son of a bitch. I used to buy his paintings. That was when I thought he was an artist first and a rat second. Gabe tells me you know the bastard, too.”
“We’ve crossed paths. What’s your theory on what’s going on between him and your daughter? I understand you saw her after she came down from Vermont.”
“Yeah, I saw her. She was in one of her ‘I must have been switched at birth because a wretch like you couldn’t possibly be my mother’ moods. Let’s get one thing straight; Lydia isn’t the virginal creature she appears to be and that her father likes to pretend she is. She was a sweet kid, once upon a time—and always the center of attention because she was impossibly cute—but when she hit about thirteen, everything changed. She became trouble with a capital T. The wrong crowd at school—including that parasite Andrea Marshall—problems with drugs, pregnant before her sixteenth birthday.”
She stopped, obviously uncomfortable with what she’d blurted out.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “You never heard that—understand?”
People were always telling me I hadn’t heard what they’d just told me.
“Her father doesn’t know about all this?” I guessed out loud.
“Maybe you are the right guy for the job,” said Mrs. Kravitz. “And maybe I should learn to keep my mouth shut.”
“A little late for that.”
She glared some more.
“But Lydia’s smart,” she went on. “Always got good grades, no matter what kind of mess she was in. She could have gone to school anywhere, but she insisted on going to Teddington.”
“I thought that was your idea.”
“Did he tell you that? He probably thinks it’s true. I went along with the idea—that’s the most I’ll admit to.”
“Why did she choose an all-girls’ school? Doesn’t sound like her kind of scene.”
“Are you kidding? Girls’ schools are magnets for boys—not to mention men who should be old enough to know better, including the half of the faculty that isn’t queer. Anyway, Gabe has convinced himself that Lydia is Doris Day in an embryonic state. Sure, she’s naughty once in a while, but only when she’s been led astray, usually by Andrea Marshall, who also can do no wrong in my husband’s eyes. That girl’s been able to wrap him around her little finger ever since she began to sprout tits. Gabe knows everything there is to know about the construction industry, but he doesn’t know shit about women, especially when they’re nubile and hot to trot. Not that he’d ever touch one of those kids, mind you. He just wants to worship them from afar.”
By now, Mrs. Kravitz had dropped her guard entirely. I mentioned that her husband had said that Lydia had told her she was planning to stay with Andrea.
“Who claims she never saw her, but the little bitch is as trustworthy as a Washington lawyer. Watch out for her, Mr. Novalis.”
She put her Ray-Bans back on.
“What are you going to do next, darling?” she asked, resuming her affected uptown accent.
“I’ll do what I usually do in a missing persons, case,” I said, “except that your husband doesn’t want me to go to the police.”
“That’s one thing on which we can agree,” she said, standing up to leave.
“Is there a number where you can be reached?” I asked. “It might be better in certain circumstances if I didn’t have to go through your husband.”
She liked that.
“I run into a lot of certain circumstances,” she said, giving me a phone number that I wrote down on a yellow pad. “That’s my boudoir number,” she said. “Use it sparingly, and please be careful.”
“Careful of Pedrosian?” I asked.
“Him for starters,” she said.
FIVE
I decided to head uptown to pay a visit to Norbert Gruen, Pedrosian’s dealer. As I walked across the park, toward the subway, I had a sense that someone was watching me. You know how it is when you’re looking hard at someone in a crowd, and suddenly that person can feel that you’re eyeballing them and turns to look at you? I had the feeling that that person gets, and I had it strongly enough that I sat down on a bench to light a cigarette I didn’t need, in order to check out my surroundings. There was no unusual action that I could see in my immediate vicinity—a pair of mothers with baby carriages, a dog walker with three Irish wolfhounds, a couple of elderly black guys playing checkers, several young w
omen who might be students from NYU or Parsons handing out leaflets touting Gene McCarthy for President, a man in a dashiki, a couple of hard hats, some Puerto Rican kids cutting school. I had been headed for the subway entrance opposite S. Klein’s department store, but now I changed direction and headed toward the entrance at the southwest corner of the park. I still had a prickly feeling at the back of my neck, as if I was being eyeballed. Maybe someone was watching me from a window overlooking the park. When I went down into the subway, however, I still felt eyes stabbing me in the back, and they seemed to follow me as I walked along the busy concourse that connects the two BMT lines with the IRT Lexington Avenue Line, where I was headed. I paused again, pretending to check out a magazine at a newsstand. Nothing suspicious. Paranoia, I told myself, but the events of the last twenty-four hours continued to spook me.
I descended the stairs from the mezzanine level to the uptown platform. Morning rush hour was over, but the platform was fairly crowded. As an IRT express rattled around the curve, a tourist with a German accent waved a map in front of me and asked me how please to get to the Statue of Liberty? I was explaining that he needed a downtown train when—just as the express was about to pull level with me and commuters were pushing forward in anticipation—somebody gave me a hard shove from behind. I had been trying to communicate with the German by gesture, and the shove caught me off balance. I staggered forward and was about to fall onto the tracks. My fate flashed in front of me—decapitated by the flanged wheels of an Interborough train among discarded soft drink containers and candy wrappers, for the amusement of an audience of Norway rats, and possibly toasted at the same time. People screamed, and as I pitched forward, somebody grabbed my jacket. I felt a warm breath of air as the train whooshed inches past my nose, and saw wide-eyed faces staring at me from inside the cars. Then I was pulled back, jerked upright, and discovered that I’d been saved by a guy built like a sanitation truck, with eyes that were almost pink—like a rabbit’s—a flat nose and frizzy hair.
“You wuz pushed,” he said. “You wuz seriously pushed.”
“Yeah,” said someone else, and someone else, too, though most people were busy battling their way onto the train before the doors closed.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“It was a her,” said my savior. “Skinny, shoulder-length hair, blue jeans—those ones with the wide bottoms—dark T-shirt. She took off for the exit. I wudda stopped her, but then you’d be goulash, and everyone else would be late for work.”
“It was a man,” said a woman in a babushka. “I saw his Adam’s apple. A man with red hair.”
“Don’t be crazy—it was a girl,” said the man with the pink eyes.
“Anyway, it was an accident,” said someone else.
“Then why did she run for it?”
“Because he was fuckin’ scared. Because he thought that a bunch of crazies were goin’ to say he did it.”
“Fuckin’ A she did it. That wuz a serious shove.”
While they argued about this, I looked around for the German tourist, but he was nowhere to be seen. Had he been deliberately distracting me? Setting me up?
Two transit cops showed up and began asking questions. The whole routine was repeated. “It was a man…” “It was a girl…” “You can’t tell the difference these days…” “Shoulder-length hair…” “Yeah, down to the shoulders…” “Red hair…” “I’d say more sort of medium brown…” “C’mon—she was blond…” “About thirty…” “No, she was about as old as my youngest daughter who is just pregnant with her first kid…”
And so on till everyone got bored. I thanked the man who had saved me, wrote down his name—Lech Zelenski—and phone number, and promised to take him and his wife out for a spaghetti dinner. He said, “Think nuthin’ of it…”
Then the cops asked me to make a written statement, so I went back to their cubbyhole office up on the mezzanine and did as they asked. I told them it was probably an accident, though I didn’t believe that for one moment. It didn’t make much difference since they weren’t about to launch a major investigation. Then I signed the paper and got up to leave.
The older cop, who had a mustache that would have earned him a part in a Mack Sennett two reeler, wagged a finger at me.
“Let that be a lesson,” he said.
“A lesson in what?”
“Think about it,” he said. “You might learn something.”
With that sage advice ringing in my ears, I headed up to street level and hailed a cab. In those days, New York taxis came in every color that DuPont could think up. This one was a genuine Checker, bright blue with yellow trim. I told the driver to take me to Madison and 57th. He was a studious-looking kid, with a green sun visor, who was listening to the news on Pacifica Radio. An excited young woman with a French accent was being interviewed about the student riots that had been raging in Paris for several days.
“We could use something like that here,” said the kid.
“You haven’t had enough of that stuff for a while?” I asked.
“Just the beginning,” said the kid. “The blacks aren’t the only ones who are disenfranchised.”
Under other circumstances, I’d have talked to him some more, but after what had just happened on the subway platform, I couldn’t handle small talk. I was dying for a spliff, and I suspect the driver would have been cool with that, so long as I shared, but I couldn’t afford to be more spooked than I already was. I just settled back and listened to the radio. “Cars overturned…Cobblestones pried loose and thrown at the police…President de Gaulle to make a speech on radio and television…”
“Another lame-dog president in the making,” said the cabbie, “just like Johnson.”
The Gruen Gallery was in the Fuller Building, an imposing deco slab on the northeast corner of Madison and 57th. To get to the gallery, you crossed a lobby with inlaid marble floors that exuded corporate wealth, then rose in an elevator entered by way of elaborate bronze-paneled doors celebrating the heroic accomplishments of the construction industry. Gruen’s walls were currently devoted to a show by some third-rate stain painter who didn’t merit a second look. Gruen was not there.
“He’s on a studio visit,” I was told.
My informant was Lena, Gruen’s receptionist, who I had nearly slept with once after a chance encounter at The No Name Bar. I don’t remember what went wrong, but whatever it was she didn’t hold it against me. It may have been a bit of luck that she was there alone, because Lena liked to talk, and not having an inhibiting boss around loosened her tongue. I let her gossip for a while—about the imminent divorce of one of the gallery’s artists and the financial scandal brewing around an ambitious young dealer who had just opened a large new space a dozen blocks uptown—then I sprang a casual question about Jerry Pedrosian.
“Does he sell much, these days?”
“Not as much as he did,” said Lena, “but he has one or two steady collectors.”
“Women?”
Lena giggled.
“You know Jerry,” she said. “Norbert would kill me if he heard me saying this, but to be honest, Jerry’s work hasn’t been moving, and he’s pretty bitter about it.”
“I know of someone who might be interested in his stuff,” I said, “but I guess Jerry’s out of town.”
“You can give me their name,” she said. “I’ll pass it on to Norbert.”
“Where does Jerry go?” I threw out, hoping for the best.
“That’s the thing,” said Lena. “Nobody knows, but he’s been taking these trips every few weeks. At least, that’s what he tells us, and anyway he’s certainly out of circulation. He usually disappears for about a week at a time. Doesn’t leave a number. No one knows how to reach him, and we’ve no idea why he’s being so mysterious. Just last month, Norbert had a nice sale lined up, but he couldn’t find Jerry, so the client went down the hall and bought a Morris Louis instead.”
I managed a couple more minutes of small talk, and flirted
a little, so as not to seem too hung up on Pedrosian, before telling Lena I’d see her around. One thought that had popped into my head while I was chatting her up was that another tenant of the Fuller Building was Mark Kalindi. Mark was a dealer in nineteenth-century prints, drawings, and watercolors. I’d known him since my days with the DA’s office when he had drawn my attention to some fake Turners that an Englishman decked out in a Savile Row suit and an Old Etonian tie was attempting to peddle. The Old Etonian tie might have worked in London, but it didn’t help much in New York, and we eventually tracked down the perpetrator, a British actor who had failed to make his mark on, off, or off-off-Broadway. I had stayed in touch with Mark, and I remembered now that he has a daughter at Teddington, which made him worth a visit.
Mark was a large man, with a rather florid complexion, whose suit was permanently rumpled. His haystack of blond hair was always on the point of insubordination. He was, in fact, the last person you would expect to be a connoisseur of the delicate arts that were his specialty. He greeted me warmly, and, knowing that I am partial to the quiet subtleties of watercolor, showed me a pair of Winslow Homer drawings he had recently acquired at auction. When the moment was ripe, I asked him how Gemma was doing at Teddington.
“She loves it,” he said, with an enthusiastic smile. “The right place for her, I think.”
“I forget who,” I said, “but someone who has a kid there was saying that he found the place too liberal, too unstructured.”
“What’s wrong with liberal?” he asked. “I suppose a place like Teddington could be unnerving for someone who lacks a good sense of who she is, but that’s not Gemma’s problem.”
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 4