You could tell from Terry’s forlorn expression he wasn’t too fond of the disguise idea, but before he could utter a single word of protest, Abby grabbed him by the hand and tugged him back across the hall, into her own apartment. I stood at my open door and watched as she pulled him across the room, then led him up the stairs to the second floor.
I knew where she was taking him. And it wasn’t to her bedroom, believe it or not. It was to the tiny spare bedroom—the little cubicle she called her Vault of Illusions—the room where she kept all the costumes and props for her paintings. It was just a big closet, really, full of all different kinds of clothes and hats and shoes and wigs, plus a large assortment of oddball items—things like swords and beach blankets and pitchforks and peacock feathers—anything she felt might help her set the scene for one of her colorful magazine illustrations. In order to keep her Vault of Illusions well-stocked, Abby collected castoffs from all her relatives and friends, and made regular appearances at all the local rummage sales.
I wondered what kind of outfit she would rummage up for Terry. And I hoped, for his sake, it would be warmer—not to mention more concealing—than a purple loincloth.
AS SOON AS THEY WERE GONE, I TOOK MY baby blue Royal portable down from the coat closet shelf and set it up on the kitchen table. Then I ran upstairs to m y spare bedroom (the unfurnished nook I planned to turn into an office if I could ever save up enough money to buy a desk) and grabbed a package of typing paper from the small stack of office supplies I kept stashed on the floor in the corner. Then I raced back down the stairs, slapped the package of paper down on the kitchen table, and sat myself down at the typewriter.
I couldn’t put it off one minute longer. I had to start making notes for my story (I mean Judy’s story), and I had to do it now, while I had the time. This was probably the last workday I’d be taking off for another whole century at least. More importantly, I knew if I didn’t write down all the details soon (i.e., immediately), they’d begin disappearing from my flimsy memory like snowflakes landing on the hood of an overheated car. And, as every true crime or mystery writer knows, too many forgotten details can result in a totally forgettable story. Or a clean forgotten crime.
I rolled a sheet of paper into my loyal Royal and began typing like a lunatic, recording every word, fact, clue, conjecture, and impression I could remember, beginning with Terry’s initial phone call to me at the office. I paid no attention to spelling, grammar, or punctuation. All I cared about was getting all the data down on paper, where it would be preserved for future reference.
I don’t know how long Abby and Terry were gone—or how long I sat there, typing my fingers to the bone. All I know is I had just finished documenting last night’s phone call to Vicki, thereby completing my eighteenth page of notes, when Abby came barging back into my apartment.
“Shut your peepers,” she said, all aflutter, “and don’t open them till I tell you to.” She was so excited I thought she might pop.
“Okay,” I said, putting my notes aside and covering my eyes with my hands, feeling like a five-year-old.
I heard some whispering and rustling in the vicinity of my front door. Then Abby giggled, and Terry groaned, and Abby bellowed “Open sesame!” in a voice that belonged under the big top.
I uncovered my eyes and took a peek. And then I flat out shrieked in amazement. Standing before me—in a long black overcoat, a black fedora, a pair of black pants, a white shirt, and a long brown beard with long brown side-curls—was a tall, dark, and handsome Hasidic Jew.
For those not familiar with the species, a Hasidic Jew was a man or a woman who belonged to a certain ultra-Orthodox sect of Jewish mystics that was founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, and was still going strong today—in America, among other places—in 1954. Many of them lived in Brooklyn. Every Hasidic male wore a black overcoat and a black fedora. They all had beards and payos—the unshorn ear ringlets which, according to Abby, were the outgrowth of an ancient law forbidding the shaving of the temples.
More to the point (well, to my and Abby’s and Terry’s point, at any rate), was the fact that hordes of Hasidic Jews were gem traders by profession and, therefore, worked on West Forty-seventh Street in Manhattan, at—you guessed it—the Diamond Exchange. So many Hasidim worked there, in fact, that the street was jokingly called the Rue de la Payos. Terry would blend in perfectly—like just another pickle in the pickle barrel.
“It’s wonderful!” I cried, standing up to make a closer inspection. “It’s the ideal disguise! The hat hides his white hair and the payoshide his white sideburns.” I gave Abby an admiring look. “They look so real. How did you make them?”
“I cut a few tendrils off a curly brown wig and glued them to the inside of the hat.” She was radiant with pride.
“I see you colored the hair around the back of his neck, too,” I added. “What did you use for that?”
“A toothbrush and a tin of brown shoe polish.”
I patted her on the back and gave her an enormous grin. “It’s the consummate costume, Abby. Perfect in every way. Edith Head would die of envy!”
“Well, I’m glad you like it,” Terry growled, squaring his shoulders as if for a fight, “but I think it’s god-awful. I feel like a total jerk dressed this way. These frilly things hanging down the sides of my face are annoying and embarrassing, and this ratty old beard smells like a sweaty gym sock.”
Abby tossed her head and shot him a haughty glare. “Would you rather spend one afternoon breathing into a smelly beard, or several months suffocating in the smelly slammer?”
“Good point,” Terry said, shuffling his feet and relaxing his shoulders. I think he was smiling, too, but it was hard to tell since you couldn’t see his mouth for all the hair.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Abby crowed, reeling toward the door. “It’s almost two-thirty! I’ll get my coat! Let’s get this show on the road!” I’d never seen her so aroused—except on those all-too-frequent occasions when she was gearing up to make a move on one of her half-dressed male models.
“Hey, hold on a second!” I cried. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?!!” she snorted, with a rather impatient huff .
“The diamonds,” I said, with a huff of my own. “Call me crazy, but I think it would be safer if you hid them away in your purse, or under Terry’s hat, instead of flaunting them all around town, strung all over your body like a batch of blinking Christmas lights.”
“Oh,” she said, finally remembering that she still had the jewelry on. She gave me a sheepish look, then reluctantly took it off, piece by glittering piece, putting it back down on the kitchen table. “I didn’t like it anyway,” she said, with a dramatic flick of her diamond-braceletless wrist. “It made me look too snooty.”
We all had a good laugh over that one. Then Abby carefully wrapped the diamonds up in their original tissue paper package and handed them to Terry, who stuck them deep in the pocket of his long black overcoat. “Are you ready, Whitey?” she asked, politely deferring (finally!) to his rightful authority in the situation.
“Yeah, let’s go right now,” he said, “before I change my mind and rip this moldy carpet off my face.”
TWO SECONDS AFTER THEY LEFT, I snatched up the phone and dialed the Midtown South Precinct. Dan’s precinct.
Look, I knew it wasn’t proper for an emotionally undone woman to call the office of the man who’d undone her—unless she happened to be his wife (and even then it was considered overbearing!). But I wasn’t exactly the proper type. And I had a very strong suspicion that if I waited until I became Dan’s wife to give him a personal call, I’d never speak to him again.
And what harm could one teeny-weeny phone call do? All I wanted was to hear the sound of his luscious voice and talk to him for a minute or two, ask him to forgive me for the way I had acted last night. (Last night? Was it only last night that he’d flown into a rage and walked out on me? With everything that had happened
to me since, it felt more like a month ago.)
The man who answered the phone told me Dan wasn’t there. “Street’s out on the street,” was all he said.
I hung up and smoked a cigarette, giving myself a phony pep talk, working like the devil to keep my soul from sagging to the floor. Dan or no Dan, I couldn’t afford to let my energies fall. I had a lot on my plate that day, and there was only one way to deal with it all. Stay hungry.
Chapter 15
THE CHELSEA REALTY OFFICE WAS ON THE ground floor of a three-story brownstone. The large hand-painted sign in the front window showed the name in bold black letters above a bed of orange-yellow flowers with dark centers. Looked like black-eyed Susans to me. It was odd to see them rising from a windowsill heaped with snow. The company logo appeared again on the entrance door to the office—gold letters with black outlines. Just the name, no posies.
I pushed the buzzer but I didn’t hear it ring. Thinking the bell was out of order, I knocked lightly on the door and waited for somebody to let me in. Nothing happened, so I tried the knob. To my great surprise the door clicked open, and I cautiously stepped inside.
At first I thought the place was deserted. There was nobody sitting up front at either of the two old wooden desks that—along with the bank of tall wooden filing cabinets—practically filled the long, narrow room. As I stood there, however, listening to my own jumpy heartbeat and looking around at the pale green walls, dying potted plants, and badly scuffed bare wood floor, I realized I wasn’t alone. There was somebody in the back room. A man. I couldn’t see him through the half-open door between the two rooms, but I could hear him plainly.
“So what the hell’re you tellin’ me, Lily? It’s not over yet? Haven’t you had enough? Jesus H. Christ! I did what you wanted. Give it up already!” His voice was extremely loud, and he sounded very angry. Since there was a long silence after he spoke, and no audible reply, I figured he was talking on the phone. To somebody named Lily. (Am I a masterful detective, or what?)
I stood perfectly still in the front office, trying not to make a sound, straining both ears toward the half-open door. If the man in the back room had anything further to say, I wanted to hear every word.
Big mistake. “Screw you!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “I’m through! Go find yourself another stooge!” There was a loud crash, made—I assumed—by the collision of the receiver with the body of the phone, and then a harsh string of curse words I’d rather not repeat. (Use your wildest imagination, and you still won’t come close.)
By this time I was feeling kind of scared. I mean, this guy was going off his rocker in there! There were sounds coming out of that room that brought to mind the breaking of human bones and the gnashing of vicious tiger teeth. Not wanting to meet the madman face-to-face, or madden him further with my surprise appearance, I decided to flee the Chelsea Realty office and come back later, when he was feeling better.
Good plan—bad timing.
I had just opened the front door to leave when the man came storming out of the back room, growling obscenities and flailing his fists against every wall and piece of furniture in reach. He looked like he wanted to kill somebody. And his murderous demeanor became even more pronounced when he saw me.
“What the . . . ?!! Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing here?” His mean little eyes were blazing and his short, wiry body was poised to attack. And I may have been hallucinating, but I would swear that two big streams of fire were shooting out of his nostrils.
“I’m sorry!” I sputtered, backing away from the heat. “I rang and knocked, but nobody answered, so I came on in. The door was open.”
He banged his fist on the closest file cabinet. “I’m gonna fire that stupid girl! She never locks up when she leaves the office!” He looked at his watch and cried, “Goddamn it! It’s three-thirty already! I sent the brat to show some office space over an hour ago and she’s still not back!” He gave me a closer look and then an overt head-to-toe once-over. “Hey, can you type? You want a job?”
“Uh, no. No, thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ve already got one.”
My rejection angered him even more. He shoved his fingers through his coarse brown hair and glared at me, screwing his long skinny pockmarked face into an ugly scowl. “Then what’re you here for, sister?” he barked. “Out with it! I haven’t got all day!”
Was the man so upset he’d forgotten what kind of business he was in?
“I’m looking for a new apartment,” I said, straightening my backbone and pasting a cordial smile on my kisser. I took the ad for Judy’s place out of my skirt pocket and handed it to him. “I saw this listing in the newspaper yesterday, and it sounds just right for me. So I was hoping to see the apartment this afternoon. Is it still available?”
He looked down at the ad in his hand, then back up at me. Now he was smiling also—so broadly and intensely I thought his tiny, tobacco-stained teeth would pop out of his gums and blast out of his mouth like buckshot. “Sure, doll,” he said, suddenly acting like my best friend. “The pad’s available. And it’s vacant, too, so I can show it to you right now—soon as you fill out an application.” Scooting over to the front desk, he snatched a printed form out of the top left drawer and gave it to me. “Need a pencil?” Before I could answer, he plucked one from the holder on the desk and handed it over.
What a chameleon! I thought, marveling at the man’s quicksilver mood change. Was he merely busting to make a buck, or was he hustling to unload a bad luck rental where a young woman had recently been murdered? From the way he was smiling and sweating, I figured both motives were applicable.
“Thank you, Mr. . . . ah . . . Mr . . . ?”
“Swift,” he said, still grinning, “but you can call me Roscoe. Come sit over here while you fill out the form.”
He snaked his arm around my waist and guided me over to the guest chair at the side of the desk.
To avoid any sneaky fanny pats or pinches, I sat down quickly.
“Thank you, Roscoe,” I said, gazing up at his lizardlike face and batting my lashes to beat the band. I was trying to look alluring and flirtatious (as Abby always advised me to do), but the effort was making me kind of sick to my stomach, so I probably just looked like a bilious cow with gnats in her eyes.
Deciding to ditch the nauseating coquette routine and get down to business, I turned my attention to the application form and hastily filled it out, giving my name as Phoebe Starr and listing my address as 104 Christopher—which was just a few blocks away from where I really lived. I put down my true phone number, however, in case Roscoe decided to dial it to check me out. Then I gave Abby as a reference, stating that she was my current landlady.
The minute I finished, Roscoe swerved over to the desk, snatched the form out of my hands, and shoved it into the top right-hand drawer. Then he pulled a set of keys out of a different drawer and jingled them in the air. “C’mon, doll,” he said with another too-wide grin. “The apartment’s right around the corner. And I got a hunch it’s the perfect pad for you.”
He didn’t mention that it had been somewhat less than perfect for the last tenant.
STANDING IN THE HALL OUTSIDE JUDY’S apartment, waiting for Roscoe to fish the keys out of his pocket and open up, I studied the lock, knob, panels, and jamb of the door for evidence of breaking and entering. Terry was right. There were no unusual marks on any of the metal parts, and no telltale nicks or gashes in the wood.
I looked at Elsie Londergan’s door for a second, thinking I might learn something by comparing the two entranceways, but quickly lost my train of thought and flew into a major panic. What if Elsie heard us out here in the hall, or saw us through her peephole, and came out to see what was going on? If she let on that she knew me and called me by my real name, my cover would be totally blown! I’d have to confess my real purpose for being here. And then I’d have to deal with Roscoe Swift as my actual self, which could significantly lower my chances of digging up any info about Gregory Sm
ythe—not to mention leave me exposed to a possible new source of danger.
(Why, oh, why hadn’t I thought of this before? Before I had hoofed it up to Judy’s apartment like a demented donkey? Before I had so willingly—okay, mindlessly—placed myself in the position of a sitting duck? If I had any sense at all I’d quit my job at Daring Detective and look for work as an oyster shucker. Or maybe a street sweeper. Some kind of job where foresight didn’t figure.)
But I was a lucky duck (or donkey) for the moment. Elsie didn’t appear. And Swift lived up to his name by opening the door to Judy’s apartment swiftly. Then we both stepped inside and he closed the door behind us, flipping on the light.
My heart screeched to a halt. Standing there in Judy’s kitchen, holding my breath and blinking against the glare of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I felt as if I had entered a tomb. Or a church. I was both deadened and electrified. And I felt closer to Judy Catcher than I ever had before. A trace of her cheap, spicy perfume still hung—like incense—in the stagnant air. I thought if I closed my eyes real tight, and concentrated real hard, I might be able to hear her humming . . .
But Roscoe quickly broke my spell. “You got to use your imagination,” he said, snapping open the kitchen window shade, then flinging wide the door to the bathroom. “The single girl who was living here moved out a few weeks ago, so the place looks empty and dreary right now. Needs some furniture and a homey touch. But just look at this flooring!” he exclaimed, gesturing toward the dingy, cracked linoleum as though it were a layer of marble veined with gold. “It’s like a ballroom dance floor! And the carpeting’s even better,” he said, lurching into the tiny sitting room and twirling once around like Arthur Murray himself. “It’s the perfect shade of red. They call it Prussian Passion. It goes with any color.”
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