Phantom Angel

by David Handler

  “I don’t either,” he conceded as he steered us around Columbus Circle and down Broadway toward Times Square. “And Dytman I don’t know. But Sue’s okay. And she’s got their ear. Do you want me to feel her out? I can find out what they’re in a position to offer if the girl turns herself in. You can relay their offer to her.”

  “If I hear from her, you mean.”

  “Right. If you hear from her.” He glanced over at me. “What’s this ‘bond’ you two share?”

  “It’s personal, like I said. Just leave it alone, okay?”

  “Not okay. Tell me. Or I won’t talk to Sue.”

  “Fine, if you insist. We’re both rape victims.”

  His face fell. “Oh…”

  “Are you happy now?”

  “Not so much.”

  “I told you to leave it alone.” I looked over at him. He had dark circles under his eyes. Probably worked straight through the night. “Did you get anything off the Navigator?”

  Legs shook his head. “It was wiped a hundred percent clean of prints—doors, windows, steering wheel, everything. And nothing was left behind. We’re still searching the carpet fibers but so far it’s a big zero. And the murder weapon’s a virgin. The rifling patterns on the bullets that killed Frankel don’t match any we’ve seen before.” He honked impatiently at a delivery van in front of us. “We’ve studied every piece of 42nd Street camera footage we could get our hands on. The Homeland Security CCTV footage, the security cams from the College of Optometry and Banco do Brasil across the street. Also anything and everything that the tourists and bystanders have handed in. We must have images from fifty different angles.”

  “And…?”

  “Those damned tinted windows shielded the wheelman completely,” Legs answered wearily. “We don’t have so much as one good look at him. He could be anybody.”

  “What about the shooter?”

  “The best picture we have is this…” He pulled a scanner shot out of a folder on the seat between us. “A tourist from Clinton, Iowa, took it.”

  It was a photo of the shooter getting back into the Navigator after pumping three shots into Morrie. The shooter wore a pair of latex gloves over what appeared to be fairly small hands. No facial features were revealed at all, not with those big sunglasses and that hoody pulled down low. The hoody was baggy and oversized. So were the sweatpants. At the time of the shooting I’d gotten the impression that the shooter was slimly built. But it was hard to tell anything definitive from the photo.

  “Not much to go on, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Legs grunted, his jaw muscles clenching as he maneuvered us through Times Square traffic.

  I studied the picture some more. “Your techies can estimate a person’s height based on the height of the vehicle, can’t they?”

  “They’re working on it, but the shooter’s crouched. They can only ballpark it within two or three inches.”

  “Did the CCTV cameras follow the Navigator after it fled the scene?”

  Legs nodded. “It went down Fifth Avenue until it made a right onto West 37th Street.”

  “A right? I thought you said you flagged it going through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel a half hour after the shooting.”

  “We did.”

  “But the tunnel’s in the other direction. He should have made a left on West 38th.”

  “I know.”

  “So why did he make a right on West 37th?”

  “I don’t know. And, guess what, there are no CCTV cameras on West 37th. It’s not heavily populated. Mostly fashion wholesalers. We’re fanned out all over the block at this very minute looking for security cams, but we haven’t found any yet.”

  “What about Sixth Avenue? Did the CCTV cameras pick it up there?”

  “Still looking,” he answered, getting an edge to his voice.

  I thought this over as we went barreling past Macy’s and Herald Square. “Let’s see, so far you have no way to ID the perps, you have no trace evidence, nothing from ballistics and you lost track of the Navigator after it turned off Fifth Avenue in the opposite direction of the tunnel. Sounds to me like you’ve got shit.”

  “I’ve got shit,” he conceded sourly. “Thanks for pointing that out.”

  “No prob. That’s what I’m here for, partner.”

  “And I’m not your damned partner.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS loincloth boy and his fairy princess lived in a loft on West Broadway. Their building wasn’t hard to find. It was the one that had all of the TV camera crews, paparazzi and celebrity gawkers crowded on the sidewalk outside waiting for the golden twosome to poke their precious noses out. A cop in uniform was trying to keep the sidewalk clear so that shoppers could make it inside of the high-end designer lighting store that was downstairs.

  Legs parked his sedan in a no parking zone directly across the street. Legs can leave his car wherever he chooses. It’s really fun to drive around town with a homicide detective.

  As we were getting out of the car my cell rang. I glanced at the screen. I took the call. “Hello, Leah. How may I help you?”

  “I don’t think anyone can do that, Benji,” she answered forlornly.

  Legs leaned against the car and made a call of his own. To Sue Herrera, I was hoping.

  “They dimmed the lights for Morrie last evening,” I pointed out. “And that was very respectful coverage in this morning’s Times, didn’t you think?”

  Leah didn’t seem to hear that. “I got up. I made myself some toast. I rode the bus here same as I do every day. But I’m all by myself, Benji. And the manager gave me the fish eye in the lobby when I got here. Morrie was a deadbeat tenant, you know. I’ll bet that man knocks on our door today and tells me I’ve got seventy-two hours to pay up or clear out. I—I’ll have to figure out what to do with Morrie’s collection.”

  “What collection, Leah?”

  “His memorabilia. Morrie had thousands of backstage photographs and Playbills. He had files on every show he produced. He saved everything. Someone will want to preserve it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do. I still know some folks at the NYU drama school. Let me know if you want me to call them for you.”

  “Thank you, I will. I’m sorry if I’m bothering you.…”

  “You’re not.”

  “But I was sitting here and I suddenly realized that the phone had stopped ringing. The obituary writers are done, and now no one else is calling.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Morrie’s friends. Like his fellow producers. Like any of the hundreds and hundreds of people who he personally gave successful careers to over the years. Not one of them has called me to offer their condolences or to ask me if there’s going to be a memorial service. You’d think there would be one, wouldn’t you? With performers singing his favorite songs from his biggest hit shows? A Broadway giant has passed, Benji, and no one has called. I knew he wasn’t exactly liked, but that man gave his life to the theater and it turns out that not one person gave a damn about him.”

  “That’s not true, Leah. You did.”

  “You’re right, I did,” she said. “And I feel awful about this mess that he left behind. I saw the way that poor girl got blasted all over crickoshea.com this morning. She’s just a young actress who got sucked into one of Morrie’s crazy scams. And now it sounds like Joe Minetta’s gorillas are out to get her.”

  “They won’t. She’s in safe hands.”

  “You know this for a fact, Benji?”

  “I do. You have my personal assurance that she’s okay.”

  She let out a sigh of relief. “Well, I’m glad to at least hear that.”

  Legs had finished with his call and stood there waiting for me now, his right knee jiggling, jiggling.

  “Leah, I’m sorry but I have to go now.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Call me any time. And take care of yourself, okay?” I rang off and Legs and I started across the stree
t. “That was Morrie’s assistant. She’s feeling kind of lost.”

  “And so she called you? I swear, little bud, sometimes I think you missed your true calling. You should have gone to Yeshiva and been a rabbi. Or, better yet, converted and become a priest.”

  “Bite me.”

  “Hey, that’s no way for a man of the cloth to talk, padre.”

  We elbowed our way through the media horde and buzzed Matthew and Hannah’s loft. Legs had phoned ahead. They were expecting us. We were buzzed in. Climbed a cast-iron staircase to the second floor, where a big steel door opened and a tall, slim young woman in a Roadrunner T-shirt and jeans waited to greet us, juggling two cell phones, an iPad and a clipboard. Both cells were ringing.

  “I’m Rachel, Matthew and Hannah’s personal assistant,” she informed us in a rushed voice. “Please follow me.”

  Rachel led us into a raw industrial space that had a soaring twenty-foot ceiling, exposed brick walls, rough plank flooring and cast-iron support columns. It was an enormous space. Dozens and dozens of tall windows let in the morning sunlight. And floor fans kept it reasonably cool. The décor was so spare that I’m not sure it even qualified as décor. There was an antique pool table. There was a huge Flying A Gasoline neon sign hanging from one wall. And out in the center of the loft space there was a seating area with two leather sofas and a pair of matching chairs grouped around a coffee table. That was where we found the 3-D screen’s Tarzan and Jane waiting for us. Way off in another time zone I could make out what appeared to be a stainless-steel restaurant-grade kitchen and a doorway that led to what I imagined were at least a half-dozen bedrooms and baths and a bowling alley.

  “Matthew…?! Hannah…?!” Rachel’s voice was raised to a polite roar because “Tangled Up in Blue” from Bob Dylan’s landmark 1975 album Blood on the Tracks was cranked up to 11 on the loft’s sound system. “Meet Lieutenant Diamond of the NYPD and Ben Golden of Golden Legal Services!”

  Matthew Puntigam reached for a remote and turned the music down. “Have a seat, why don’t you?” he said off-handedly. “I was just listening to this fellow called Bob Dylan. Know him?”

  “Not personally, no,” Legs said as we sat down.

  Hannah Lane said nothing. Just smiled at us. She seemed to be in an ethereal daze. Or stoned. Possibly both.

  “Know his music, I meant,” Matthew said. “I envy the way he sings. It just flows right out of him. So natural. So him. It’s not a quote-unquote good voice. But I think the fucker actually pulls it off. Perhaps that’s just me.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Pretty much everyone on the planet who has ears has felt that way for the past fifty years.”

  Matthew furrowed his heavy shelf of brow at me—his patented Me Tarzan frown. My response had thrown him. He was twenty-three. He had been a huge movie star for four years. He was accustomed to believing that every word that came rolling out of his piehole was a genuinely original pearl of wisdom. “You were at Zoot Alors the other night with that Cricket O’Shea person, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Thought so. I’m very good with faces. It’s a talent of mine.”

  “Nice little place you have here,” Legs observed, gazing around.

  “Isn’t it? Used to be a shirt factory. They made actual shirts here.”

  “I just like having the space,” Hannah said in her soft, trembly voice. “New York is so crowded.”

  The coffee table consisted of a slab of glass set atop an old leather steamer trunk decorated with decals from bygone luxury liners and European hotels. Matthew reached over to it for a blue box of Gitanes, the French cigarettes. He lit one with a kitchen match and inhaled it deeply, letting the smoke out through his flaring nostrils. I was struck by how practiced his mannerisms seemed. Styling. The man was styling. And, once again, I was struck by how small he was. His brow and jaw gave him such a brutish look on the big screen. But seated here in his arena-sized loft Matthew Puntigam was just a shrimp in a torn T-shirt and linen lounge pants.

  Rachel continued to hover there with all of her portable devices. “Can I get either of you a coffee?”

  Legs and I both declined.

  “There’s no coffee in my coffee,” Matthew said pointedly. “Could you make me another?”

  “Absolutely, Matthew,” she said, whisking a cup from the coffee table.

  “And do you think you could get it right this time? Double espresso, two sugars. Is that so hard?”

  “No, Matthew.” She went trekking off toward the kitchen.

  “We can’t go out for coffee like normal people do,” Hannah informed us morosely. “Can’t walk down the street. Can’t ride the subway. Those people out there won’t let us. They follow us everywhere with their cameras. They’re just so mean.” Hannah was from northern Minnesota and the words that passed between her plump, rosy lips had a slight Canadian lilt to them. “I wish they’d just leave us alone. Why can’t they leave us alone?” she wondered, gazing at us with those huge, gorgeous green eyes of hers. Up close and in person, the twenty-two-year-old screen goddess was so slender that she resembled a starved, frail child. She wore a snug-fitting camisole and yoga pants. Her wild mane of strawberry blonde ringlets was piled atop her head, showing off her delicate, swanlike neck. Hannah’s milk-white complexion was so flawless that it looked as if her skin had never been exposed to the elements. Not sun, not wind, not rain, not any of them. Nor to life itself. Had she ever fallen off her bike and skinned an elbow? Scratched her leg on a thorny rosebush? It was impossible to imagine.

  Legs couldn’t stop staring at her. He did keep trying to look away—at Matthew posing there like Belmondo with his cigarette, at the Flying A Gasoline sign, at me—but his eyes kept returning to her. I didn’t blame him. It isn’t often that you sit so close to a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Hannah Lane. And yet Matthew was cheating on her. With a man who was old enough to be his father, no less.

  “It would be so nice to just be able to go out to Starbucks like normal people do,” she said.

  “But we can’t,” Matthew said with a shake of his head. “Not without having our every fart being covered in the Post. So we have to do for ourselves.”

  By “ourselves” he meant Rachel, who returned now with his double espresso, two sugars. She waited anxiously for his royal highness to sample it.

  “That’s more like it,” he said gruffly when he had.

  “Can I get you folks anything else?”

  “No, we’re fine, Rachel,” Hannah said. “Thank you.”

  Matthew didn’t thank her. Rude. He was conspicuously rude.

  “She’s my cousin,” Hannah explained as Rachel headed back toward the kitchen. “We’d be lost without her, wouldn’t we, Matthew?”

  He said nothing to that. He was busy drinking his espresso, smoking his cigarette and studying Legs. “How may we help the NYPD?” he asked him. “You said something on the phone about some questions you have?”

  Legs nodded his head. “Very informal ones.”

  “Should a lawyer-type person be here?”

  “That’s up to you. If you want to involve your lawyer we can come back later.”

  “Not necessary. Lawyer-type people are utter vermin.”

  “Besides, we’re happy to help,” Hannah assured Legs.

  “Excellent,” he said, flashing her a smile. “Since the Morrie Frankel investigation is so high profile, I have to ask each and every person who knew Mr. Frankel the same exact thing. It’s strictly routine. I’ve invited Ben to come along because it so happens that he was working for Mr. Frankel. Plus Ben has often been very helpful to the department in the past.”

  All of which sounded like complete bullshit to me. But they accepted what he said without question.

  “What would you like to know, Lieutenant?” Hannah asked.

  “Where you were yesterday afternoon at, say, one o’clock.”

  She blinked at him in surprise. “Is that all? That’s easy. I was worki
ng with a dance instructor at a studio on Warren Street. I’m trying to get back in shape now that my ankle has fully healed.”

  “What do you think will happen to Wuthering Heights?” I asked them. “Will it ever open?”

  “Of course it will.” Matthew stubbed his cigarette out in an antique black ashtray from the Stork Club and promptly lit another. “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, your producer is dead.”

  “Producers grow on trees. They’ll find us another one.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  Matthew drank down the last of his espresso. “Panorama, who else?”

  “And what about Henderson Lebow? He and Morrie had a bitter falling out. Will he come back to direct it now that Morrie’s no longer around?”

  “Haven’t the slightest idea,” Matthew said with a shrug.

  “But I really hope he does,” Hannah said. “It’s Henderson’s vision that we’re staging.”

  “Not Morrie Frankel’s?” I asked her.

  “Morrie was just a money man,” Matthew sniffed. “Nothing more.”

  I found myself looking at Matthew Puntigam in horror. I’d never heard anyone dismiss a man’s entire life’s work quite so thoughtlessly. Especially a man who’d accomplished as much with his life as Morrie Frankel had. Not that I for one second thought that Matthew had scripted his bilious little epitaph on his own. He was, I felt certain, merely parroting the scorn of the director whom he happened to be shtupping behind Hannah’s back. “I paid a call on Mr. Frankel at his hotel shortly before he was murdered,” I said to him. “He was screaming at somebody on the phone. That somebody was you. He told me afterward that you were trying to back out of Wuthering Heights.”

  “Not true at all,” Matthew responded calmly. “It was nothing like that. Morrie immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion and then went totally ballistic. The man could be quite impossible to deal with, you know. I simply told him we’re contractually obligated to begin filming The Son of Tarzan next May in Tanzania. And that if we don’t open Wuthering Heights pretty damned soon—say, by the first of October—then we won’t be able to stay with it long enough for him to turn a profit.”