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by Konstantin

  * * *

  An hour after my shower I was riding the L train to Brooklyn. Though the real-estate people keep moving the borders, the address Nikki Cade had given me was more Bushwick than Williamsburg, and not convenient to any subway station. I picked the Montrose Avenue stop and worked my way south along Bushwick Avenue, leaning into the wind all the way. It was a short walk from trendy to just getting by; vegan bistros and handbag ateliers gave way to bodegas and auto parts shops and boarded-up shells in the space of a few blocks. By the time I got to Holly Cade’s street, there was nary an artisanal cheese market in sight.

  Her building was five stories of dirty red brick, with a gray stone stoop, friable-looking fire escapes up the sides, and liberal coats of graffiti all around. There was a smell out front like burnt garbage, which beat the hell out of the festering-wound odor in the vestibule. There was an intercom box on the wall, with a mangled speaker grate and worn plastic buttons with apartment numbers next to them. The name next to 3-G was written in green ink on a strip of masking tape. Cade.

  I leaned on the button for a while and got no response, and I was thinking about what I might do to the massive lock on the inner door when a pack of teenaged girls came boiling off the elevator and down the short hallway toward me. I didn’t ask why they weren’t in school, and they paid me no mind as they passed in a swirl of perfume, hair-spray, bubblegum, and cigarette smoke. The inner door was gaping in their wake, and I walked up to three.

  The stairwell was narrow and dark and smelled like a urinal, and the third-floor corridor wasn’t much different. The door to 3-G was at the end of the hall to the left, adjacent to 3-F and the trash chute. The door was metal-clad and once upon a time it had been painted black. When I put my ear to it I heard someone moving around on the other side. I knocked hard and the moving stopped but no one answered. On my third try I heard a bolt slip and hinges squeak behind me. I turned in time to see a narrow gap in the door to apartment 3-F close quickly. When I turned back to 3-G, the door was opening.

  The man in the doorway was an inch or so taller than I and maybe forty pounds heavier, none of it fat. His shoulders barely cleared the doorframe as he stepped into the hall. He closed the door behind him, locked it with a key, and put the key in the pocket of his gray parka.

  “What do you want?” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft. He crossed massive arms on a massive chest and strained his sleeves to tearing. His blond, crewcut head was large and square, and affixed to the rest of him without benefit of neck. His face was broad, pale, and smooth, and his close-set features looked stunted and abandoned in the center. His mouth was a pink ripple below a pinch of nose, his brows no more than sketch marks above blue eyes that were empty of curiosity and everything else. His hands were like steaks and there were blurry green tats on them that looked like prison work. I put his age at thirty, tops.

  “This your place?” I asked.

  “I got the key,” Babyface said. “Now what the fuck do you want?”

  “I’m here to see Holly.”

  “She’s not here,” he rumbled. “What do you want her for?”

  “Who are you, the husband? The boyfriend? The secretary, maybe?”

  Color rose on his flat cheeks. “I’m the guy who’ll plant his boot up your ass, you don’t say why you’re banging at the door.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “Let’s not get stupid too fast,” I said, with more nonchalance than I felt.

  Babyface squinted at me and a wrinkle formed on his smooth forehead. “You a cop?”

  “Why would a cop be looking for Holly?”

  “You’re a cop, lemme see some ID.”

  I smiled some more. “You didn’t answer my question: why would a cop be looking for Holly? Or maybe it’s you they’re looking for. Maybe you’re the one who should be showing ID.”

  The wrinkle deepened and his big face got dark. “You’re no fucking cop,” he said. “And you’re pissing me off.”

  “Get Holly out here and you won’t have to talk to me anymore.”

  Babyface shook his head. “You don’t listen,” he growled. “Now, you say who you are and what the fuck you want or we’re gonna have trouble.”

  He flexed his large hands. I looked at the ink on them and took a deep breath and took a chance. “Do you talk to your PO like this? I don’t expect it goes over too well.”

  Surprise, anger, and fear flickered through his eyes at the mention of his parole officer; I figured I’d struck a nerve. I was sure when he hit me.

  His forearm was a tree trunk in gray nylon, and it whipped around like it was driven by a storm and banged me on the side of the head. I bounced off the door to 3-F on my way to the floor, and I caught a glimpse of Babyface’s biker boots and the frayed hem of his jeans flashing by.

  “Asshole,” he muttered. I heard his footsteps down the stairs, and then all I heard was a ringing in my ears and all I saw was dirty linoleum.

  I took a few deep breaths and prodded at my temple and slowly hoisted myself up. My head stayed where it belonged and so did the rest of the world, and I was reasonably sure that nothing was broken. I looked up and saw the door close again on apartment 3-F. I stepped over and knocked.

  The voice that answered came from somewhere near the peephole. It was a man’s voice, reedy and old and with a faint Spanish accent. “Get the hell away,” he said. “Get away or I’m calling the cops.”

  “I’m trying to get in touch with Holly Cade,” I said. “You know how I might do that?”

  “I don’t know nothing, except I’m tired of all the noise and shouts and comings and goings, and the next time this shit happens I’m calling the cops.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “Do you know who that guy was?”

  “I know nine-one-one, and unless you leave now, I’m calling it.”

  I took a card from my wallet. “I’m going,” I said, “but do me a favor, will you: give me a call the next time you see Holly around.” I slipped the card under the door and almost instantly it came sliding back.

  “Get away from me with this— I don’t want anything to do with it or you.”

  “You don’t have to be involved in anything,” I said. “Just give me a call. I can make it worth your while.”

  “Nine-one-one, mister. I’m not telling you again.”

  I held up my hands. “All right, all right, I’m going.”

  “Then go.”

  I took my time down the stairs and saw no sign of Babyface. I stopped in the vestibule and buzzed 3-G again, and again got no answer. The name next to the button for 3-F was Arrua; I copied it down and left. It was still cold outside but not as windy, and the burnt-garbage smell had subsided under a blanket of new snow.

  6

  The cold air tasted good after the reek of Holly Cade’s building, and the snow helped numb my aching face, and so I walked over to Broadway and kept on walking, north and west, deep into the hipster heart of Williamsburg. Block by block the neighborhood changed, from mostly Latino to Hasidic to well-heeled bohemian. By the time I got to Bedford Avenue my hair was white with snow and I might as well have been in TriBeCa.

  I found a coffee bar with Citizen Cope playing at low volume and some fat chairs by a window and a pretty Asian girl with a gold ring through her nose behind the counter. I brushed myself off and ordered a double espresso and sipped at it slowly while I scratched down some notes about my visit to Holly’s place.

  I got a good description of Babyface on paper and some questions about him too: Who was he? What was he doing in Holly’s apartment? What was his relationship to her? But I had no answers for any of them. All I knew for certain was that he was strong and fast, and that if I ran into him again I would watch out for his right and for his very short fuse. I finished writing and drank some more coffee and flipped back through the pages of my notepad.

  Holly Cade was so far my only line on the mysterious Wren, but I still knew precious little about the woman, and I had yet to actually lay
eyes on her. Knowing where she lived was progress, but until I had a photograph and a positive ID from David, she would remain just my best guess. I could, if I had to, hire some freelancers to set up outside her building and wait until she came home, but I hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet. That approach was neither cheap nor subtle, and I still had a bread crumb or two left to work with. I read through another few pages of notes and wondered if I might eke something more out of my trip to Brooklyn than a shot in the head and a pricey cup of coffee.

  * * *

  Null Space was south and west of the coffee bar, off Bedford Avenue, in a gray brick building that long ago had been a tea warehouse. It shared the ground floor with an art gallery and a Chinese fusion restaurant, and it was the venue, three years back, where the Gimlet Players had staged a production of Holly Cade’s play, Liars Club. It was a large, chilly space with black walls and a dense array of lights and speakers hanging from the high ceiling. Any lingering fragrance of tea was obscured by the odors of paint and cement, and by the smell of lemongrass from next door.

  The manager was a sturdy, fortyish woman with dark, messy hair, a pleasant gap between her teeth, and a plaid flannel shirt. Her voice was flat and Midwestern and her name was Lisa. Besides a squad of underfed guys stacking chairs, she was the only one at home when I knocked on the big metal doors. She’d worked at Null Space for six years, remembered the Gimlets well enough, and didn’t ask what business it was of mine. It made for a near-perfect interview.

  “They did three or four one-acts here, over the course of eighteen months or so,” she said. “Liars Club was the last of them.” We walked into what passed for the office, a gray, square room that almost had a view of an alley through a window black with dirt. The furniture was mismatched metal, too ugly for government work. Lisa took a seat behind the desk and placed her can of Diet Coke before her. I sat in a banged-up beige guest chair that was even less comfortable than it looked.

  “Were they any good?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I remember the plays being very heavy, in a theater-class kind of way. A lot of disjointed dialogue and fucked-up families. And I remember the Gimlets being kind of a pain in the ass.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Lisa drank some soda and ran a hand through her hair. “They were always complaining about something— the seating, the lights, publicity, the audience or lack thereof. And they were always in the midst of some crisis or another.”

  “Such as?”

  “Amateurish crap, like actors not showing up on time, or at all, or losing props, or just bickering.”

  “Any idea about what?”

  “Who knows; stars on the dressing room door, maybe. I tried not to pay attention. Whatever it was, it seemed like they could never get their shit together.”

  “I’d guess you get a fair amount of that in this line of work.”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” Lisa said, smiling. “And the bands are usually the worst. But it gives you an idea of how whiny the Gimlets were that they stand out three years later.”

  I smiled back. “How many of them were there?”

  She thought for a moment. “Four or five, maybe.”

  “And all of them complainers?”

  “Not all of them; it was mainly the two who kind of ran things.”

  “Was Holly Cade one of them?”

  She nodded again. “Holly, yeah, the redhead, a very pretty girl. Her boyfriend was the director and she was the writer.”

  “What was the boyfriend’s name?”

  Lisa drained her soda can and dropped it in the trash basket with a bang. “Now you’re asking the hard questions,” she said. “For that I need to dig.”

  The digging was done in a closet stacked almost to the ceiling with cardboard file boxes. There was evidently some method to their stacking and Lisa knew what it was. With only a modicum of shifting and shoving she brought out a box and heaved it onto the desk. A cloud of dust swirled up and Lisa coughed. She took off the lid, flicked through some files at the back of the box, and came out with a green folder.

  She shuffled through the contents and pulled out some paper. “Ta-dah! It’s the program we did for The Nest—another of their one-acts.” She read the sheet and looked up at me. “Gene Werner, that was his name. Truth be told, he was the bigger pain in the ass.”

  “Can I see that?” I asked. She passed it over.

  I scanned down the short list of cast and crew. Besides being director and playwright respectively, Gene Werner and Holly Cade were also in the cast. Gene played someone named Fredrick; Holly played a character named Wren. I read it twice more to be sure, and heard blood pounding in my ears. Wren.

  “You mind if I keep this?” I asked.

  Lisa shrugged. “Okay.”

  I looked at the program and thought some more. “You remember what Gene Werner looked like?”

  She chewed her lower lip and thought it over. “Not that well. Dark hair and tall, good-looking— a male model type.”

  “A bodybuilder?”

  “You mean all bulked up?” she asked. I nodded. “No, he was more like you— kind of lean.”

  Not Babyface. I pointed at the file box. “Any photos of the Gimlets in there?”

  “I can check,” she said, but my luck went only so far. Lisa rifled through the files from back to front and found no pictures— but she didn’t come up empty-handed. She pulled out programs for the other two plays the Gimlets had performed at Null Space, and scripts for The Nest and Liars Club. She let me take them along when I stepped out into the snow and headed back to Manhattan.

  * * *

  It was two-thirty when I got home. I ran a towel through my hair, pulled on a pair of dry socks, and made a tuna sandwich, then spent the rest of the afternoon on my laptop and on the telephone, tracking down former members of the Gimlet Players. Which turned out to be easier said than done. Lisa was right about there having been four or five people in the troupe. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always the same four or five people. Counting Gene Werner, there were seven names on my list. By dusk I’d left messages for three of them, including Werner, failed to find any trace of three others, and actually managed to speak with the remaining one.

  Moira Neal told me that the Gimlets had never been a close-knit group, and that she hadn’t kept in touch with any of them after the breakup. She had acted with the troupe for just a year, and the experience had helped to drive her out of theater altogether and into website design.

  “And let me tell you, the personalities are a whole lot easier to deal with.” She laughed. Her voice was smart and pleasant, and as empty of accent as a newscaster’s.

  “The Gimlets were a difficult bunch?”

  “Holly and Gene were, and it was all their show.”

  “Difficult how?”

  “Gene was a prima donna and a bully— which, let me tell you, is not a winning combo. He thought he was another Mike Nichols or something, but he didn’t have the chops to back it up. And he took great pleasure in being a Grade A prick, a real nasty son of a bitch. Holly was a little easier to take; she was just on another planet most of the time.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning she was very serious about her work, very…intense. I don’t know how much the real world ever penetrated when she was working on a play.”

  “Was she any good?”

  “As a playwright, not very— at least, I didn’t think so. Her stuff was really autobiographical, and there was a big part you just couldn’t get if you weren’t Holly. The part you could get was kind of juvenile: lots of evil-parent stuff and lots of proclamations.”

  “How was she as an actress?”

  “That was a different story altogether: Holly was great. It helped that she was gorgeous and you couldn’t take your eyes off her, of course, but it was more than that. She was totally committed to every part she played, and she could transform herself completely. It was a little scary, to be honest. I always wondered if she could
do it in a part she hadn’t written.”

  “And she and Werner were romantically involved?”

  “They slept together, on and off, if that’s what you mean. As for ‘involved’— that I don’t know. I’m not sure how involved Holly could be with anyone but Holly.”

  “I heard that besides the writing and acting, Holly made videos too.”

  “Not while I knew her, but it wouldn’t surprise me. She tried her hand at lots of things— painting, photography, even woodworking, I think.” Moira Neal paused and a little smile entered her voice. “You really need to know all this for an accident case?”

  I smiled back. “You never know what you’ll need to know,” I said. “Speaking of which, did you happen to know someone named Wren when you were with the Gimlets?”