"I work, Artie. Some people do, you know."
"Jellyroll would be honored to pick up the tab." She put her hand on my forearm and made it tingle, but that was just a way of saying no. "I have some negatives, Phyllis. About ten. I thought you might know somebody who could print them for me. Fast."
"How fast?"
"Immediately. They were Billie's." I wanted to tell her everything, lie down like a little boy with my head in her lap and tell her the whole rotten story.
"Color?"
"No, black and white. Thirty-fives. I'll pay a hundred dollars if I can get them this afternoon. Is that reasonable?"
"Sure. Let me think. It'd be nice to get the money to somebody hungry." She pulled a black address book from her back pocket, where I wanted to be. For a troubled instant I thought about Palomino and his frigid wallet.
"Phyllis, what did the Post say?"
"The Post? Jesus, why?"
"I don't know. I guess I'm scared to see it by accident in the subway or blowing in the gutter. I'd rather hear it from you."
"It said in those ugly black letters: BOUND, DROWNED. The article said some unnamed source in the police department told the Post that one of Billie's former lovers was under suspicion."
"Oh."
"Billie had a lot of lovers, Artie. I guess you know that."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry," she said, but I couldn't answer. "I'll go make a few calls for you."
Did the police really suspect me? Two hefty guys came for the cable I was sitting on. I stood up, and they took my seat away.
The producers were heading my way in a rank, led by Jellyroll, wagging his tail. They wore those bright, expensive smiles of good cheer. "That's quite some dog you have there, Mr. Deemer," said Moe. "Quite some dog indeed." Larry and Curly vouched for that.
"Just between us, Mr. Deemer, we have Barnaby Price playing Dracula. We're very excited about working with Barnaby."
I had never heard of Barnaby Price, but I didn't say so. I nodded vigorously and enthusiastically, I hoped.
"And Prudence Akroyd is playing the girl."
"Oh, great," I said, but I'd never heard of her either. It makes people nervous when you tell them you never heard of people they think are hot shit.
"And we're very interested in Jellyroll." Larry and Curly concurred. "Can we call you Arthur?"
"Artie."
"Well, Artie, we're very interested in Jellyroll. Very. Of course, we have to see some more dogs, but between us, we're interested. Sincerely... Are you his handler, Artie?"
"Yes."
"Well, between us, Artie, Samoa is paradise this time of year." Moe clapped me on the shoulder like a guy who had just gotten off a neat one at the smoker. "Say, Artie, tell me, does Jellyroll always cock his head to the side like that when you talk to him? I mean, could we count on him doing that? Regularly, I mean?"
"If you ask him questions."
"Then you think we could get it on film right now?"
"Sure," I said. Samoa is paradise this time of year.
Phyllis returned to the studio. I tried to catch her eye for a sign, but I should have known she'd give none while I was talking to the bosses.
"Could we get this, please?" asked Moe to the studio in general, and he seemed frightened some technician would tell him no for reasons he couldn't understand.
"Quiet, please," someone called, and Moe lookeded relieved. Camera people took their places.
Jellyroll sat center stage in the hot lights like a lamb for the slaughter. I stood out of the camera range, and Jellyroll pivoted to watch me. His handler. I began to ask him questions, nonsense mostly, since it's the intonation, not the words, that counts. He cocked his head from side to side with each question. His ears were pricked, his eyes bright and expectant. The producers hugged each other with glee.
"Do you want to go to Samoa?" I asked Jellyroll. That killed them.
Moe took my arm and escorted me to the door. Larry and Curly pumped my hand. Then they all clapped Jellyroll on the sides. He sniffed their shoes for a clue to their identity.
I waited for Phyllis out in the hall. The receptionist ushered Vinnie and Roger into the studio. "You can bank on Last Hurrah," said Vinnie as he passed me. Phyllis came out as Vinnie went in.
"I got somebody. Her name's Marsha. She'll meet you in the lobby near security. I told her to look for Jellyroll."
"Thanks a lot, Phyllis."
"Is there going to be a funeral or anything like that?"
"I don't know. Her father's in California. I guess that's up to him."
"Call me if you hear." She kissed my cheek in a warm, friendly way, then patted Jellyroll's head and said, "So long, you sweet little gold mine."
Marsha called me at home at two o'clock to say the prints were ready. She phoned from the subway at Times Square and offered to deliver them anywhere I wanted. I asked her to meet me at the Greek coffee shop on Broadway at 104th.
On the way out, I took the elevator to the basement and went looking for Fidel, the super. He wasn't in the furnace room or the laundry room. I heard salsa from his workshop and followed the beat. Fidel was glaring at an electric motor he had clamped in a vise. He held a long screwdriver as if it were a bayonet with which he was about to kill the motor. A short, balding man with a coarse brush of a mustache, Fidel had been superintendent of this building for thirty-five years. He could do everything, weld and plaster, he could repair air conditioners and elevators, he could place a bet for you, and put a fresh motor in your juicer, and he could, I suspect, speak a lot more English than he let on. I knocked on the wall, but he couldn't hear me over the music.
"Hi, Fidel."
"Ey, ey, Artee. Refrige." He pointed at the motor. "Focker. I keel." Then he looked at me, ready to take my beef. My bathroom ceiling fell in last month due to an upstairs leak, and Fidel had been dragging his feet on the replastering job. You come out of my shower smelling like a spelunker, and Fidel figured I was down to press him on it.
"I'd like to have a key to the back entrance," I told him. The tenants' entrance is on 104th Street near the corner, but around on Riverside is a service entrance, a huge spiked gate that leads down a flight of rough steps to a narrow, dark courtyard, not much more than an air shaft between buildings. From there, with another key, I could get into the basement and up to my apartment unseen by anyone watching the front entrance. I was being prudent and farsighted, and I felt momentarily proud of that.
Fidel's expression didn't change, but his black eyes kind of glazed. "Not allowed, not allowed," he said. "Landlor', call landlor'."
I laid two twenties on the bench near his vise. He peered at them. You could see him weighing the danger to his position should I do something crazy against forty bucks for doing nothing. "You a good one," he said, by which he meant I didn't dog him around like Mrs. Fishbein, and that seemed to tip the scales. He opened a drawer and handed me two keys. "No loose, no loose," he warned, holding the keys next to his heart. I pocketed them, he pocketed the twenties, and I shot the motor with my forefinger.
"We keel," he said. "We keel together like Magnificent Seven." I appreciate the straightforward nature of my relationship with Fidel.
Marsha was waiting in a booth, her hands folded demurely over a manila envelope. When I sat down across from her, she opened the envelope and proudly passed me a short stack of eight by tens. I noticed she had little-girl hands, unmarked by the world. "It was nice," she said. "I got to use the darkroom at NYU. My boyfriend works there. I made three sets for you."
I hoped she wouldn't notice how my hands trembled as I shuffled through the stack. People. Strangers to me. No! Not all of them. There he was, unmistakably. Stretch.
A waiter arrived and stood over us silently, saving his voice. "Coffee with Sweet'N Low, please," said Marsha.
Stretch was making a phone call. His face was furrowed with worry or frustration as he stood on tiptoe at the phone station. The shot was taken from an elevated angle across the str
eet. Then I saw that the pictures of Renaissance Antiques were also taken from across the street and up several floors. Billie's studio.
I looked up at Marsha. She was smiling happily at my apparent enthusiasm for her work. "Very good," I said, and passed her an unsealed envelope holding $150. She counted it avidly, and when she got to the end, she giggled with delight. "Hey, thanks a lot, Artie. Artie, right? Marsha said. I sure appreciate it. Look, I want to show you something—" She slid around the table to sit beside me. "See these?" She isolated four photos from the others and found the negatives to match. "These are weird." She held the negatives up to the light. "Do you see why?"
"No."
The waiter arrived with the coffee. Marsha took a twenty from the envelope I gave her. "Allow me," I said.
"These are photos of old snapshots, like from somebody's album. They've been rephotographed with a micro lens, you know, to get real close."
"Why would anyone want to do that?"
"I can't think of any reason. Except that you come out with a thirty-five-millimeter negative."
"I see." Then you cut the negative from the strip and you hide it in the ice tray in case you get killed.
"Look at this one," she said, pointing to a picture of a pilot, World War II era, standing in front of his fighter plane. "This is a photo of an old Life magazine cover. You can see the bottom of the letters, and see, here's the date." As she was pointing out these things, I was thinking with a dry, hollow feeling in my stomach about how many photographs I'd lost in the mud of Union Square Park.
"Listen," said Marsha, "I'm having a show. Not a biggie, informal." She took from her backpack a hand-lettered flyer that said: "Marsha Cook, Fragments of a Vision." The address was out in the Fordham section of the Bronx.
SEVEN
I PUT PROFESSOR longhair on the box, turned him well up, double-locked the door, and spread out Billie's bequest on the floor. Jellyroll sniffed each in turn. I grouped the photographs according to age, the old "family snapshots" in one pile, the "new" in the other.
I looked first at the old:
He is a fighter pilot. Handsome in the fresh, down-home way so common in World War II faces, and he poses before his airplane. He can't be much over twenty, and his pose is jaunty. He leans against a vertical propeller blade, big smile, his arms folded, legs crossed at the shins, one foot pointing straight down into the tarmac. His plane, I happen to know, is a P-47 Thunderbolt, a powerful, fat-bodied fighter that weighed as much as some light bombers, but strong. Pilots called it the Jug. Back near the bubble canopy, glinting sunlight, there are painted two rows of black swastikas, his "kills." The boy is an ace. He radiates confidence, his white silk scarf tied like a cravat and bloused up around the collar of his flight jacket. There is the feel of a high school yearbook about this picture. The star halfback, he might have been posing against the whitewashed leg of a goalpost more congruously than against one of the deadliest single-seat airplanes of the war. Just over his head, beneath the half-cropped title of Life, it says July 18, 1944.
As a kid, I'd pore for hours over photos of the war. My father was killed in a P-51 when I was six months old. Two weeks after the Germans surrendered, he flew into a railway bridge over the Meuse while playing dogfight with his squadron mates. They had at their hands and feet the fastest fighter in the world, but they were born too late to use it at its bred purpose; but my father was no less dead, leaving me to look at photographs as a way to understand what it was like to have a fighter-pilot father. Or one of any kind.
I turned to another:
A young girl in a stiff organdy dress crouches on her knees, trying to induce a cute spotted puppy to jump over a stick she holds about three inches off the ground, but the puppy is uninterested in tricks. He seems about to chomp on a dandelion.
The same little girl in the next photo:
She stands between two adults, holding their hands at the beach, the ocean lapping around their ankles. The little girl's mother, if that's who she is, is beautiful, long, light hair touching her shoulders, a slim, sexual body in one of those modest 1940s bathing suits with the little skirt pieces so you can't see the curve of her crotch. And the father is the ace on the cover of Life magazine!
The same family appears again:
Christmas. Ace, Mom, and the happy little girl are gathered around the decorated tree, a manger scene laid out at the base on a white sheet as if Christ were born in the snow. Rumpled, sleepy-looking as if they just got up, but smiling, Mom and Ace are watching the little girl open a present. The spotted puppy is the present. The little girl's glee can almost be heard from over the years.
Two birthdays ago Billie gave me a good camera. I got it from the closet, removed the lens, and used it like a magnifying glass to examine the little girl's face...Billie? Did she have a tiny fleck of gold in her eye? The old photos were too grainy to tell. But suppose it were Billie; suppose that the ace and the beautiful blonde woman were her father and mother? What kind of sense would that make? You have this suspicion that you might get murdered, so what do you do? Do you rephotograph some scrapbook pictures of your childhood and stash them in your ice tray for your ex-lover to find? Sane people don't do that.
Suppose Billie weren't sane. Suppose the purpose of sending me into that fridge wasn't to find photographs at all but to find Frozen Freddy. Professor Longhair was singing about some wild women on Rampart Street, and I smoked half a gasper to ease my ugly thoughts, but it didn't do much good. I put Billie's childhood in a single pile, and then I turned to the rest of the photographs from the ice tray, but I was interrupted by someone pounding on my door. I hoped it was a neighbor, Mrs. Fishbein or someone, come to tell me my music was too loud, but it wasn't.
"Cobb. Open up, Mr. Deemer."
I shoved the photographs back into their envelope and slid them under the stove.
Cobb and Loccatuchi looked mean. They wore the same raincoats, only wetter than the night before last. In unison they sniffed the air.
"What are you, Deemer, some kind of chronic doper?"
"No, I—"
"Go ahead, Sal, read him."
"You have the right to remain silent; everything you say can and will—"
"Wait a minute! You're arresting me?"
"Yep."
"For what? For marijuana? You need a search—"
"Fuck marijuana. We're arresting you for tampering with evidence in a murder investigation, obstructing justice, and generally being a shithead. Then we'll come back with a warrant and turn this place upside down. We find dope, we'll tack that on too. Turn that down. What are you, deaf from all that dope?"
I turned the Professor down. "Listen, why don't we have a seat and discuss this?"
"Have a seat where?"
I brought in two chairs from the dining room, but neither cop sat down.
"The deceased kept a studio at 88 East Eleventh, that right?" Cobb asked.
"Yes."
"The place has been ransacked. What do you know about that?"
"Ransacked? Nothing."
"Bullshit, Deemer. The superintendent of the building says a man fits your description was there about midnight. He says this guy was wearing an army-surplus rain poncho." He pointed over his shoulder at my poncho hanging guiltily behind the front door. "So what were you looking for, Deemer?"
What about Palomino? "I was there last night." How could they have missed him?
"That's better." Cobb sat down, and Loccatuchi imitated him. I sat in my Morris chair.
"But I couldn't get in."
"Why not?"
"The door was locked."
They stared at me. "Locked? It was midnight, what the fuck did you think it would be?"
"I thought I had a key, but it didn't fit."
"Let's see it."
I went to the foyer and picked up what I knew to be a key to a neighbor's place down the hall. I handed it to Cobb, who examined it, but I figured that was phony.
"Why'd you go in the first place?"
"To get some photographs. I was feeling very low about Billie. I went to her studio to get some photographs as a remembrance. But the key wouldn't fit. Maybe it's the wrong key, or maybe Billie changed the lock."
"So you tried the key, then gave up and went home?"
"Yes."
Cobb lit a cigarette and peered at me through the blue smoke, a hot-browed gaze. He stood up and took a stroll around the living room. He looked at things, the stereo most intently; he even stuck his head in the bedroom. I figured it was a ploy to unnerve me, and it was working. But I wanted to keep those photographs for a while. Billie meant them for me. "I been seventeen years on the force, Deemer, and I developed this itch. Sal can tell you. I get this itch right here in the back of my neck when some mope's tryin' to bullshit me." Pretending to examine my preamp, his back to me, he made exaggerated scratching motions with both hands. "The lock was drilled out. Gone. Totally. So don't feed me that bullshit about the wrong key."
The answer to that seemed so obvious I was scared to try it. But my confidence was growing. He wasn't going to arrest me. If he were, I'd be down there right now, phoning my lawyer at Jerome's Billiard Academy. "Couldn't the lock have been drilled out after I left?"
Cobb stared at me for a long time, neck probably itching like impetigo, before he said, "Why did the deceased take pictures of bums?"
"She felt sorry for them. She was expressing compassion."
This, clearly, was a difficult notion for Cobb to grasp. "Renaissance Antiques. That ring any bells?"
"Isn't it across the street from Billie's studio?"
"Good. What else?"
"Nothing. Just a store. Isn't it?"
"Yeah, right. Just a store. Anybody else been around asking questions?"
"Like who?"
"Like who? Like anybody in the whole fucking country!"
"No."
"You must think we're a bunch of chuckleheads, Deemer. Sal, he must think we're both simple fucks."
It's true, I was beginning to think they'd missed Freddy altogether.
"Let's go, Sal. This guy's a liar." Then he turned back on me. "One day soon, Deemer, we'll find out how you're connected to this, and don't tell me you aren't, insult my intelligence. Then we'll be comin' for you."
Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 5