Phantom Angel

by David Handler

  “When was this?”

  “About three years ago, I think. Her mom ended up marrying the guy. Boso never forgave her. She totally hates her mother. Won’t even let her know where she is.”

  “And what about her stepfather?”

  “She doesn’t talk about him much, other than to say he’s an asshole. Boso’s someone who has strong feelings about people. She’s got a lot of fire in her. She’s smart, she’s intuitive…”

  “Is she a sound sleeper? Does she get nightmares?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “All of the time. How did you know that?”

  “Please continue. You were saying she’s smart, she’s intuitive…”

  “And a hard worker,” he added, nodding. “She slung drinks for caterers, taught exercise classes, any kind of cash gig she could get. She took a lot of acting classes in the East Village. Went on all sorts of auditions. Boso’s super talented. She’ll make it. I really believe that. Because she’s genuine. Most girls I meet aren’t. They’re layer upon layer of artifice. Not Boso. Her heart is right there. She just reaches in and hands it to you.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Two months ago. She told me she’d seen an ad on Craigslist for some agency that was looking for models and actresses.”

  I felt my stomach muscles tighten. “And…?”

  “She met with some guy in midtown who told her he could get her paying work right away as a model. She went back the next morning to have him take some pictures of her and…” Farmer John trailed off, his broad chest rising and falling. “And that was the last I saw of her. She never even came back for her clothes. Not that she left much behind. But I keep thinking she’ll come back.” He gazed at me imploringly. “Do you think she’ll come back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you do me a favor if you find her? Will you tell her that I miss her? So does Leon. He’s the kitten we got. She loved that little cat.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell her.”

  He mustered a smile. “Thanks. And come on back any time. I’ll put you to work. I’ll even buy you that beer. Deal?”

  * * *

  I HAD TWO VOICE MAILS from the great Morrie Frankel on my cell phone. The first one was quite cordial: “Benji? It’s Morrie. I was wondering if you’ve made any progress yet. Call me back, okay?” The second was considerably less so: “Benji? It’s Morrie. Again. I want to know what’s going on. Call me the fuck back, you little pisher!”

  My dad taught me to never give a client too many details in the early stages of an investigation. Those details have a way of mutating on you as the hours go by. So I didn’t call Morrie the fuck back. Not yet.

  I rode the No. 3 from Brownsville back to the Wall Street station, where I joined up with the sweaty mass of subterranean straphangers who were packed in down there like stewed tomatoes waiting for a train, any train. I caught the M, which took me to the Lower East Side. I was in search of a dirty old man.

  His name was Phillip J. Barsamian, known by his friends as Philly Joe. Back when I landed two days of work on Law & Order: Criminal Intent playing a prep school drug dealer it was Philly Joe who played my weary old public defender. The two of us got to talking between setups and I discovered that way back in the late 1960s Philly Joe had been a hot young Broadway somebody who’d scored huge as the goofy kid brother in a hit Neil Simon comedy. From there he’d landed the goofy second lead in an offbeat little Robert Altman film. Goofy was in real demand in those days, and Philly Joe was the clown prince of goofy—tall and gangly with a shock of curly red hair, a huge Adam’s apple and such unusually long arms and legs that he resembled an ungainly prehistoric bird. He’d gone out to L.A. to star in a sitcom pilot for Norman Lear that CBS didn’t pick up. Was quickly offered a role on the sitcom Rhoda but chose instead to return to Broadway to star in a play that folded in a week. And then, before Philly Joe knew what hit him, goofy was out and so was he. Now, forty years later, he was just another struggling actor who worked in his family’s business to make ends meet.

  His family’s business was Helen’s, a dairy restaurant that had been selling blintzes, borscht and mushroom barley soup on the same corner of Second Avenue and East 8th Street since the 1930s. Helen had been Philly Joe’s grandmother. His brother and sister ran the restaurant now. Philly Joe waited tables there when he wasn’t going on auditions, same as he had when he was a teenager.

  I was looking for him because Philly Joe happened to be a rather unusual authority. The man devoted every free moment of every day and night to the singular pursuit of watching online porn. This made him someone whom I occasionally found helpful. Like, say, when a guy has just told me that his hot young girlfriend answered an ad in Craigslist and was never heard from again. Philly Joe was, by most people’s definition, a perv. But my job brings me into contact with people who are far pervier. Besides, I felt sorry for him. He was a gifted actor who’d flamed out. And he hadn’t enjoyed any non-virtual sexual activity since 1982. That was when the last woman who’d been willing to sleep with Philly Joe told him that she’d tried to cope with his cooties but couldn’t. There was no denying that he had them. Cooties, that is. There was something just a bit off about Philly Joe.

  Helen’s was doing a brisk business at five o’clock. The Early Bird Special crowd flocked there. So did the Lower East Side’s young hipsters. Philly Joe was on the job in a white shirt, black slacks and white apron. He was pushing seventy. His shock of red hair was streaked with gray. But he was still a comically gangly, splay-footed creature as he made his way down the aisle balancing a tray full of borscht. An adroit waiter he was not. Shaky was more like it.

  “Hiya, Benji boy,” he called to me cheerfully. “Want some dinner?”

  “Information, actually. I’m in a position to pay you.”

  “And I’m in a position to let you. I’ll take my break.”

  He joined me out on the sidewalk a few minutes later, minus his apron. The thermometer was still hovering in the upper 90s, and the humidity was stifling. But we didn’t have far to go. Philly Joe lived right around the corner from the restaurant in the same rent-stabilized studio apartment he’d always had. He was a tidy housekeeper. His bed was made. Everything was nice and neat. Just not clean. Philly Joe’s apartment had cooties same as he did. It was as if he’d polished the furniture with earwax.

  He’d left the window air conditioner set on low. He cranked it up to high and parked himself at his round oak dining table, which was anchored by a twenty-seven-inch Mac desktop computer. “Who have we got?” he asked, stretching and popping his fingers like a pianist preparing to play a concerto.

  I passed him Boso’s headshot and sat in the chair next to his. Not too close.

  He squinted at it, twitching his busy beak of a nose. “Hmm … Her face isn’t much to go on. There are an awful lot of girls who look like this. Any tats?”

  “A sunflower on her left foot.”

  Now Philly Joe raised his eyebrows at me. “Are you sure it’s not her right foot?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. Why, do you know her?”

  “I might, my young friend. I just might. You know who I’m thinking of? Sweet young Cassia. Also known as Lisa B and Eva E. These girls go by a million aliases, which I don’t have to tell the man whose mom used to call herself Abraxas. What’s this sweetie’s real name?”

  “Jonquil Beausoleil. She calls herself Boso. Have you seen her?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen her. I never forget a rosebud. And this girl has herself a real beaut.” He started tapping away at his keyboard. “Hmm … She doesn’t have her own Web site yet. Not under any of her aliases. Is she new at this?”

  “Been at it less than two months.”

  “Still getting her dainty feet wet. In that case…” He tapped away some more. “Yeppers, here she is. She’s listed as Cassia on sweetgirls.com and as Lisa B and Eva E on babesalone.com. Those are both so-called good girl sites. Nothing more than modeling and
webcams. In the world of hardcore that makes her a virgin—unless she’s also hooking on the side, which at least half of them are. But why go there? It’ll just depress us.… I’m finding two photo galleries and one video. Ready to check her out?”

  A gallery of twelve color photographs came up on his computer screen. He converted it to a slide show for me. A slide show of Boso sprawled this way and that on a bed wearing a black velvet thong and nothing else—unless you count that tattoo on her right foot. Her long blond hair was tousled. Her big blue eyes promised all sorts of carnal delights. She had an amazingly well-toned little body, just like Farmer John said. And a golden, all-over tan. Rose petals were scattered across the bed in a way that I guess was meant to be artful. The photos were no more revealing than anything you could see in Playboy.

  “She’s some little sweetie, isn’t she?” Philly Joe’s tongue flicked over his lips in a most unappetizing way. “And all natural, too. Those boobies are a hundred percent real.”

  The second photo gallery had been shot on the deck of a sailboat at sea. The clear sky and sparkling water were blue. The deck was white. And Boso was oiled up and golden—an All-American dream girl captured in an array of poses that managed to not only demonstrate how limber she was but to offer a dozen different unobstructed views of her hairless hoo-hoo.

  Philly Joe sighed contentedly. “Like I said, it’s a genuine rosebud.”

  My eyes scanned the boat for a name or registry, but I found nothing. I also studied the coastline in the distant background. It looked vaguely familiar. “Can I see the video now?”

  It was brief, less than two minutes long. Boso was stretched out in a lounge chair applying baby oil to her naked self, rubbing it slowly and seductively over her small breasts and flat stomach. The lounge chair was parked on the balcony of a high-rise hotel or apartment building. There was a planter box behind her and a sliding glass door next to her. She was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, which interested me greatly.

  “Can you e-mail me the links to all of those, Philly Joe?”

  “On their way as we speak,” he assured me, tapping away.

  “Tell me about these good girl Web sites. Where do they originate from?”

  “Probably some guy’s basement in Croatia,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “A lot of these girls are from the former Soviet Republics.”

  “This one’s from the republic of Louisiana.”

  “Really? We have a Louisiana right here in the good old … Oh, you’re pulling my pud, aren’t you, you little wisenheimer.”

  “What’s in it for the guys who run these sites? If you can access this stuff with a click, I mean.”

  “What we just looked at is considered promo material. They’re hoping you’ll ante up thirty-nine dollars a month for membership in their Gold Club or Premiere Club or whatever the hell they’re calling it. That gets you access to live streaming webcam videos and private online chats. Private sex shows, too, or so they promise.”

  “You’ve never antied up?”

  “Benji, I’ll be seventy years old in a few weeks. There’s more free porn available on the Internet than a man my age can shake his stick at, you should pardon the expression.” Philly Joe twitched his nose at me again. “Boso’s a tasty little piece, my young friend. It’s only a matter of time before she loses her virginity. They’ll have to turn her out. Won’t be able to help themselves.”

  “I know that.” I set four fifty-dollar bills down on the table. “Are you still going on auditions?”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll still be going on auditions when I’m on life support. Hey, I hear they may be reviving The Odd Couple. Don’t you think I’d be a perfect Felix?”

  “I think you could play the hell out of Felix.”

  “Doc Simon liked my work, you know. That’s what he said to me when I was in his show. He said ‘I really like your work, son.’ Did I ever tell you that?”

  Honestly? He’d told me that three times. This made four. The old man clung to the playwright’s forty-five-year-old compliment like it was a life raft. But I wasn’t about to take it away from him. Nope, not me. “You never did, Philly Joe,” I said. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

  “A hell of a thing,” he agreed, beaming at me as I went out the door and left him there.

  * * *

  “MORRIE FRANKEL HAS PHONED five times in the last two hours,” Lovely Rita informed me.

  “What did he want?” I said into my cell as I hoofed it westward on East 8th Street.

  “You, little lamb. He told me you won’t return his calls. He used some very naughty words to describe you.”

  “I hope you defended me.”

  “I couldn’t. I was too busy blushing.”

  “Got any news for me, Rita?”

  “Plenty. For starters, R. J. Farnell’s high-flying hedge fund, the Venusian Society, has no assets, no investors and conducts no business of any kind. I checked with a friend of mine who’s a lawyer with the SEC. He’s never heard of it or of Farnell. Neither has my pal who’s a governor of the Federal Reserve.” Rita has a lot of Wall Street friends from her lap dancer days. “Real deal? The Venusian Society is nothing more than a name and a Web site. It’s bogus. He’s bogus. Mind you, I have found eighteen R. J. Farnells in the tri-state area, plus another dozen who are listed as Robert J., Richard J., Ronald, Randolph, Rance…”

  “Rance?”

  “I’ve eliminated ten of them so far, unless you’re looking for, say, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise in Freehold. I’ll keep at it, but I’m not feeling very lucky.”

  “What about those phone numbers that Morrie had for him?”

  “Nothing more than disposable cells. His girlfriend, Jonquil Beausoleil, is totally off the grid. No driver’s license, no credit cards, no nothing. This is a girl who doesn’t want to be found. I can try to back-trace her from Charleston if you—”

  “It’s not Charleston. It’s Ruston, Louisiana.”

  “Sounds like you got somewhere.”

  “I found her, in a manner of speaking.”

  “What manner would that be?”

  “I just forwarded you two nude photo galleries. Also a video.”

  “Got ’em. Let’s see what we … Oh, goodie, here she is on a yacht. Wow, she sure is a limber little thing, isn’t she? I could never do a full split like that. Not even when I was on ’ludes. What am I looking for here? Because I’ve seen a vay-jay before. Although I’m wondering if they Photoshopped hers because it really looks like she’s wearing lipstick on it, don’t you think?”

  “I think we’re getting off of the subject here. And no.”

  “Okay, here she is on her tum-tum in a hotel room. What am I…?”

  “Any detail, however tiny, that might tell us where she is. When you start enlarging the images you may spot something. An item on that nightstand next to the bed. Or a reflection coming off of a picture on the wall. Maybe you’ll be able to make out what’s outside the window.”

  “Want me to check out the yacht, too?”

  “Please. And zoom in on that coastline in the background. I could be wrong but it sure looks like the South Shore of Long Island to me.”

  “I’ll see if I can find a landmark. What else?”

  “Are you watching the video yet?”

  “Hang on … Yeah, Boso’s rubbing baby oil on her boobies. What about it?”

  “Those mirrored sunglasses she has on. I thought I saw an image reflected in them.”

  “You do realize that you’re the only man in the entire world who was looking at her sunglasses, don’t you?”

  “Can you digitally enhance it?”

  “I’ll try,” she sighed. “But there’s only one of me, Benji, and I just broke my umpteenth dinner date with Myron. He got all sore at me about my ‘priorities’ so I promised I’d meet him for a late supper and … did I remember to mention there’s only one of me?”

  “What I remember is that one of you is more than enough
for any man.”

  “Are you getting frisky with me?”

  “What if I am?”

  “You need to find yourself a nice girl.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”

  I caught the No. 4 train up to Grand Central, then rode the Shuttle across to Times Square where I was, in fact, looking for a girl. Although the one I was looking for wasn’t somebody whom I’d call nice.

  The sun was setting by the time I climbed the steps up to 42nd Street. Times Square is no longer the deliciously raunchy Times Square of old with its XXX movie houses, dive bars and sleazy strip clubs. It’s now a gaudy Las Vegas-style re-creation of Times Square. Ginormous Diamond Vision TV screens soar one atop another twenty stories into the sky hawking Coca-Cola and Bud Light. There’s a Hard Rock Cafe. There’s a Levi’s store. Families of tourists wearing fanny packs crowd the sidewalks, walking four, six, eight abreast, loaded down with shopping bags. Times Square just doesn’t feel like New York anymore. Although on a steamy hot summer night it does still smell like New York—that oh-so-distinctive blend of car exhaust fumes, molten blacktop, street vendor hot dogs, maxed-out sewage pipes and decomposing garbage.

  It was nearing curtain time, and the sidewalks of the theater district were crowded with people. I took Shubert Alley to West 45th Street and made my way past the Booth, the Schoenfeld, the Jacobs and the Golden, knowing I’d find her eventually. Cricket O’Shea was never anywhere else once evening fell. I walked past the mammoth, shuttered David Merrick Theatre on West 46th, where Wuthering Heights had been in rehearsals until Hannah Lane broke her ankle. I tried Joe Allen’s, but the bartender there told me he hadn’t seen Cricket. I stuck my nose in Bruno Anthony’s on Eighth Avenue, hangout of choice for out-of-work actors. No sign of her. Nor at Margot Channing’s, the bar across from the Hirschfeld. From there I made my way along West 44th to Zoot Alors, a boisterous Parisian-style bistro that was popular with theatrical agents, flacks and journalists. They were stacked three deep at the hardwood bar and filled the tables under the brightly lit chandeliers. I didn’t see her there either, but since Zoot Alors was her favorite haunt I figured she’d end up there eventually. Plus my stomach was growling. So when a barstool opened up I slipped my way onto it and ordered myself a cheeseburger with fries and a glass of milk.