I sat there for a long time, trembling. The right earpiece of my glasses stuck straight out to the side, and my nose hurt. I don't know how long I sat there before I was capable of reshaping my glasses and considering my next slick move.
I still didn't have what I'd come for, assuming it was still there. No, forget the whole thing. The only sane move was to find the nearest phone and call the cops. I couldn't go back into that office. No. Out of the question...Yet I had come a long way to get here—here in the women's john. It was the surprise that had devastated me. That only happens once; I knew now that in fact there was a curled up corpse in the fridge. If I were to return, I wouldn't feel that same mind-altering terror. Would I? Naw. Hell, I wouldn't even need to look at him. I could cover the fridge with my poncho and reach in for the ice tray. I could even call the cops after I'd done that. At least then I'd know what it was Billie had left for me. I wanted to know that.
The poncho slid off as I was reaching in for the ice tray, but I averted my eyes from the frozen face. The ice tray contained no cubes. Instead, the little molds held thirty-five-millimeter negatives, each individually cut to fit. I crouched beside the corpse and emptied the negatives onto the eight-by-ten glossy face of a clearly insane bag lady. There were about a dozen of them, but I didn't stop to count. I stacked them in a single pile and put them in my shirt pocket. I replaced the now empty ice tray and closed the refrigerator door.
Wait. There's a body in your murdered ex-lover's icebox. Can you close the door on it with no effort to determine its identity? I reopened the door and coldly studied the contorted form. He was sitting on his wallet, which meant I had to move him.
I grasped folds of his brown leather jacket and pulled. He didn't budge. I tried several sharp, short jerks to crack him loose, but that didn't do it either. I sat on the floor and braced my boots against the frame of his coffin to get my back into it like an oarsman. That dislodged him with a sickening rip.
When I was a dumb little kid about nine, an older boy whom I idolized because he had a paper route told me that to sled his hill with the other paperboys, I would first have to touch my tongue to the naked steel runner. When I withdrew my tongue, I heard the skin rip as if made of cloth, and seeing the little circle of it frozen to the runner made the pain seem doubly intense. I've never forgotten that ripping sound. And that's what happened to this poor dead man's forehead. A big pocky, bloody bowl of skin stuck fast to the aluminum side of the freezer box. I never did look square at this forehead, but I saw it peripherally—white bone from his hairline to his brow. He was nearly halfway out of the refrigerator.
His right cheek hung over the edge. If he was right-handed, that's where he'd carry his wallet. If he was left-handed, I decided, I'd forget the whole project. I removed his cold wallet and a black Ace pocket comb with flecks of dandruff in it. I searched his wallet in a kind of crazy compulsive haze. It held four tens and a five, a scuba diver's certification card, a membership to a Y in Queens, a condom in a foil packet, a poorly exposed photo of a kid on a tricycle, and a New York driver's license that said he lived at 2150 Woodlawn Avenue and that his name was Frederick Palomino. Billie's ex-lover. For whom she dropped Leon Palomino. For whom she dropped Sybel, for whom she dropped me. Now dead as a frozen claw hammer.
I was aware that I was leafing through a dead man's life, that I'd ripped off his forehead to get at it, but my brain wasn't making any judgments about it. I was brewing up a pot of coffee, toasting an English muffin, tasks, nothing more.
I returned the chilled black leather to his pocket, and with my feet I shoved him back into the tiny crypt. His head went in crooked, protruding, but I forced the door closed and gave it a sharp rap with my boot, then another, until I beat Palomino's skull in far enough for the latch to catch.
After you toast the coffee and brew the bread, then what you do is wipe your fingerprints off the appliances. Daily life. Get the fingerprints off the light switch and the doorknob. With the back of my hand I pushed the studio door open a crack and listened. I stepped out into the empty hall and realized I was soaking wet, but I was out of that charnel house with what I came for in my shirt pocket. Now I was just a guy walking down the hall on the way home after a long but rewarding day spent in the furtherance of his career in refrigeration. Then I heard footsteps. I stopped. Another fresh jolt of seemingly inexhaustible adrenaline shot through my body, but I walked on innocently toward the stairs. The footsteps came closer.
He was a shrimp of a guy about sixty with horn-rimmed glasses and two comical tufts of hair above each ear but nowhere else. He looked like a tall midget. He passed me and turned down Billie's hall. As he did so, our eyes met for an instant. I saw a flash of surprise or fear. Whatever it was, it was plainly not the intentional disinterest of strangers passing in a hallway late at night. I looked back. So did he. Then he turned around and accelerated. I watched him go. He stopped in front of Billie's door and turned to me.
"Where is Barnett Osley?" he demanded of me.
"Who?"
"Are you part of this photography crowd?"
"Photography crowd? No."
"I beg your pardon." He turned and headed for the back stairs.
What? I stood rooted stupidly in my spot as he turned out of sight.
I ran down the central stairs and reached the lobby in time to see Stretch hurry out the front door into the street. He turned right. I hurried to the door and looked out. He crossed Eleventh, and for a moment I thought he was heading for the front door of Renaissance Antiques, but he turned left onto Broadway.
I crossed Broadway to follow from the other side.
Was I part of the photography crowd?
He scurried across Thirteenth and continued north without looking back. But then suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to survey the street behind him. I ducked down in a crouch behind a parked car. Walking arm in arm, two fellows under a giant golf umbrella turned from Thirteenth onto my side of Broadway. When they saw me, their conversation ceased in mid-sentence, and they hugged the building to give me, clearly a ruthless hubcap thief, a wide berth. I pretended to be very concerned with my wheel well, but Stretch had spotted me. He ran north toward Union Square. Tiny arms and legs churning in a wet blur, he made it across Fourteenth against the light and vanished into Union Square Park, a menacing patch of darkness in the middle of the traffic.
Picture books of old New York show Union Square Park as an elegant, sunny refuge from one of the city's busiest intersections. Couples, now dead, stroll arm in arm in dapper suits and frilly ankle-length gowns, big hats. Vestiges of its former state—mature English planes and elms, a bronze statue of George Washington astride a huge horse, and a monument to the Union with the entire text of the Declaration of Independence printed in noble bronze letters—still remain, but at night it's no place to be. Bands of small-time dopers, dealers, and chain snatchers own the place after sundown, and the Declaration of Independence is graffitied into nonsense.
The park and most of the surrounding square were slated for restoration. Several of the old buildings you see in the picture books already lay in confused piles of rubble. Two hulking, dirty bulldozers sat near the park entrance like great yellow crustaceans feeding on muddy chunks of sidewalk, and rolls of chain-link fence were stacked like firewood nearby, ready to encircle the park once the modern denizens were driven out. I walked into the darkness.
You're a damn fool, I told myself. I had no clear idea what I was doing or what I would do. Tackle Stretch and sit on him until he told me what the hell was going on? I stopped ten yards in, waiting for my eyes to adjust. I listened. I watched Cobb draw a chalk line around my spread-eagled dead body. It didn't mean a thing to him, routine. I saw movement, a dark shape, darker than the background.
"Help!" It was Stretch, the same squeaky voice that asked if I was part of the photography crowd. "Help me! Please!"
"Hey, assho'—" This was a different voice, a deeper one, a mean one, and it came from behind me.
I spun. "Why don' you pick on a man y'own size?"
There were four of them, dim, huge shapes moving to encircle me. "Who are you?" I asked stupidly.
"We jus' members o' the community, tha's all, an' we don' like to see assho's beatin' up on dorfs."
"Oh, no, you don't understand," I said. "That's my old man. He's been drinking, on the sauce, you know. Mom wants him home. She's sick. Very sick. Colon trouble. That's why the old man's been on the sauce. This is just a domestic problem, but I sure do appreciate you looking out for the old man."
"No! No!" squealed Stretch from somewhere back behind the Declaration of Independence. "That man means to kill me!"
"Oh, come on, Dad. It's me, Frank."
"Don' you fret, Pop. You get on outta here. We take care o' this assho'."
On any other given evening in the dark remove of Union Square Park, these community members would have been delighted to stomp Stretch into the cobblestones for his loose change, but not that evening.
"Hey, assho', why don' you pick on Slicer here. He's 'bout yo' size." A hulking form about the size of George Washington's horse stepped toward me. I could hear that rotten little Stretch sprinting north out of the park, leaving me with Slicer and the Merry Men of Sherwood.
I turned and ran. Ran hard. For about six strides. Until I hit a fence, a solid little wrought-iron welded bastard of a knee-high fence (except to Slicer, to whom it would seem a croquet wicket). I went ass over canteen, struck a tree trunk and landed in the mud at its base. I was hurt, and I had felt negatives brush my face when my shirt pocket upturned. The shadowy figures peered over the fence at me lying in the mud.
Conversations about urban violence aren't uncommon in New York. At a dinner party, say, someone might tell you how their doorman found this headless, limbless torso in the airshaft. In one such dinner conversation, I heard a very attractive woman say that what you want to do in the face of imminent assault is to fake a fit. "You mean like an epileptic fit?" asked a diner interested in specifics. "Hell, any kind," the woman said. "Most muggers don't have EMS training." That's what I did. Faked a fit. All kinds. I screamed in unbearable agony and bowed my spine in seizure, I made claws of my fingers and twitched them, I bellowed, gurgled, and I slapped my shoes together.
"Th' fuck's he doin'?"
"Dyin' looks like."
"Just what the assho' deserves, pickin' on dorfs. Hey, assho', you goin' straight to hail."
I sustained convulsion, and just before I exhausted myself, the Merry Men faded into the darkness. Then I rolled over and started digging in the mud. On hands and wounded knees I groveled in the mud for negatives, like Silas Marner searching for his stash. I was out of character to the point of derangement. As I found one, I shoved it hysterically into my shirt pocket along with gouts of mud. I wasn't sure how many I found. Maybe all of them; probably not. When I could search no more, I dragged myself back over the fence and out of the park. I tried to hail a cab from the northern end near the subway station.
Five passed me. Then two more, even though I was waving wildly. I realized why—they thought I was a madman. I wouldn't have disputed them. I pulled bills from my pockets and waved them in both hands at the next cab.
"I'm a mud wrestler," I told the driver when he gave me that New York are-you-nuts? glance.
"Ya lost, huh?"
SIX
I REMOVED MY crusty clothes, then washed the negatives in a pasta strainer. I laid them side-by-side on a glass table and put a desk lamp on the floor beneath them. Too much glare. I put my muddy T-shirt over the lamp.
People, singly and in groups. All strangers to me. I felt let down and frustrated. What did I expect? A face with a sign held beneath its chin saying, "I did it"? Then I noticed that most of the subjects were standing in front of Renaissance Antiques. The rest of the photos, not of Renaissance antiques, were too grainy to make out.
I fished Sybel's number from my pocket. I could phone her, tell her about the subjects and the settings, see what she says. Unlikely as it seems, I thought maybe I could be subtle about it, feel her out, without mentioning poor frozen Freddy, utterly oblivious of the fact that it was after midnight. I phoned her.
"Haw-wo?" An Asian woman. I woke her up.
"May I please speak to Sybel?"
"Ha?"
"Sybel."
"No See-ball! No See-ball!"
"I'm sorry."
I hung up. I'd have to call again to be sure I didn't misdial.
"Haw-wo!"
I knew I should call the police. However, Billie had placed in my hands something important. Billie hadn't sent it to the police. She sent it to me. She was trying to communicate with me. But what was she trying to say? I smoked a gasper and essentially passed out.
I got up at eight, because Jellyroll had a nine o'clock call. I'd have skipped it, called in dead, but I didn't relish the idea of sitting around thinking about Billie and the photographs. Besides, I'd promised. Ordinarily, he doesn't have to audition. They know him. They just phone our agent with the gig. But a week ago I'd agreed to audition for a TV movie called Dracula's Dog because they were going to shoot in Samoa. The way I heard the idea, Dracula had this dog, a pet that he took everywhere and that, I guess, lay around the coffin all day and pissed in the hometown dirt. They originally wanted a mean-eyed rottweiler with rabies, but then some dork decided "to go the other way!" Get Dracula a cute and cuddly dog and film the whole thing in Samoa. The dog is so cute and cuddly that Dracula, moved, mends his bloodsucking ways and joins the Polynesian Legal Aid Society. Or something. When the alarm went off, I almost called to cancel, Samoa or no Samoa, but I went because I respected the director and didn't want to fuck him up.
"Hey, Artie, how's it goin'?"
"Hi, Vinnie." Vinnie was lame. His knee didn't seem to work. He lay nearly supine on the black leather couch in the reception room at ABC over on Sixty-ninth near Columbus. A buff-colored cocker spaniel named Roger sat at Vinnie's feet and panted nervously.
I told the receptionist at her little window that Jellyroll was here. Everyone hops to when he shows up. Sometimes it's embarrassing. She asked me if I wouldn't please have a seat for just one moment. Then she went off to pass the word to the heavies.
I took a leather seat beside Vinnie. Jellyroll and the blond cocker sniffed and circled and wagged their tails.
"Hello, Mr. Deemer," said a fleshy woman from across the room.
"Oh, hello, Mrs. Sackley." Mrs. Sackley was a professional handler who always wore gloves, as if she didn't want actually to handle an animal.
"I see your Jellyroll every time I switch on the set," she said with a frigid smile. Jellyroll moved over to sniff her schnauzer, but Mrs. Sackley didn't approve of sniffing. She shielded the schnauzer with a mammoth leg. "Isn't your Jellyroll sweet." I called Jellyroll back before Mrs. Sackley slipped him a ground-glass burger.
"Hey, Artie," said Vinnie. "Last Hurrah in the fifth at the Meadowlands. Great mudder, best mudder I ever saw in twenty years. Pontoons for hooves. A sawbuck on the nose'll land the smart man two bills. I just wanted you to know."
"Okay, thanks, Vinnie," I said, but I knew he'd never leave it at that.
"I got pals in the paddock. They showed me his hooves. The size of your head!" His eyes, the left one clouded with cataracts, pleaded with me to show interest. "Last Hurrah could water-ski, you had a boat big enough. Roger ain't been workin' all that much or I'd put down my own twenty."
"I tell you what, Vinnie, here's forty. Put it down for both of us." What else could I do?
His good eye sparkled, and he excused himself to go in search of a phone. I ruffled Roger's ears.
"Yes," said Mrs. Sackley, "every time I switch on my set."
"Right this way, Mr. Deemer." The receptionist smiled. Of course it's unfair, but what can I do about it?
The receptionist led us into a chilly black TV studio. Three fellows wearing headphones argued intently but silently up in the control booth. I knew one of them, but he was too b
usy arguing to return my wave. Idle camera operators stood drinking coffee and talking about sex. Camera operators, I've noticed, talk about sex a lot. Then three producer types, identical in every respect, approached me with three big smiles, sincere smiles that made you want to believe them. But of course you can't. They each in turn shook my hand with equal firmness, after which they kneeled down to fuss over Jellyroll. One looked up at me and said, "Could we just get to know him for a while?"
I said sure and ruffled Jellyroll's ears before I left him to the sharks. Sometimes I think Jellyroll sees this crazy scene as just a lot of happy humans who want to pet him, but sometimes I think he sees that at bottom there is me selling him out after giving his ears a hypocritical ruffle. Those three guys were walking him around, calling him here and there and generally acting like they'd never been near a dog. I went to talk to one of the camera operators.
"Hi, Phyllis."
"Artie. I heard you were coming to save the day." Phyllis was a blond woman with a weathered face, as if she'd recently returned from a sailing trip or an expedition to the Andes, and she had about her the quiet confidence of people who do that sort of thing. We sat on some coiled cables in the corner, and though people bustled around pushing mike booms and things, they paid no attention to us. "So you met Larry, Curly, and Moe," she said.
"What's their story?"
"Fear."
"Do they test every dog that comes in?"
"In film and video. We've been here nine to five for two weeks."
"Well that's good for you." I liked Phyllis.
"I'm sorry about Billie."
"I had to identify her body."
"You did?" She looked squarely into my face, looked with unselfconscious concern into my eyes. "You look bad, Artie. Why don't you take some of your dog's money and go to an island somewhere it doesn't rain?"
"Will you come with me?" The idea of us scantily clad on a dry island was very appealing, but I knew she wouldn't do it.
Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 4