The Crasher

  “Can’t I come in, Ginny?”

  Her heart was breaking, but she couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk him being there when she heard what Poppy had come to tell her about Alex.

  “Not now, Johnny.”

  Tomorrow, she silently pleaded, give me another chance tomorrow.

  He shook his head, grim-faced again. “Expecting some-one?”

  “No, no one. I’m just not ready to see you right now.”

  He was leaning against the door. She could see the time on his watch. Almost six-thirty. She had to get rid of him. Poppy could appear at any moment.

  “Please, Johnny, please go.”

  He flung the magazine on the floor. “Goodbye, Ginny.”

  It sounded so final, so cold, she didn’t know how she let him leave, watching him trudge down the stairs, his shoulders hunched over, beaten.

  “I love you, Johnny,” she mouthed, the tears streaming down her face. “I’ll always love you.”

  It wasn’t until she heard the front door bang shut that she picked up the magazine and went inside. She was in so much pain she couldn’t even open it to read what Johnny had written about her.

  She lay down on the bed, motionless like a sick person, staring up at the ceiling. She stayed that way for what seemed like hours, but when she heard the buzzer again it was only seven-thirty; for Poppy, almost on time. She made sure it was Poppy before she opened the front door and they collapsed into each other’s arms like long-lost sisters, both crying, wailing, holding each other up.

  “Oh, Ginny, I can’t believe what’s happened, can you? First Svank, now Alex.” Poppy threw off a red satin coat and collapsed into a chair. Ginny tried not to wince at the color clash. Underneath the red satin, Poppy was wearing a bright pink dress with a miniskirt, which, as she slumped back, rode up to show off her glorious legs in matching pink hose all the way to her thighs. With a flourish she took off her oversize dark glasses.

  Ginny gasped and involuntarily turned her head away, not knowing where to look. Poppy was wearing a lot of makeup, but it still wasn’t enough to hide the black-and-blue bruising around her eyes, nor the dark marks and swelling around her cheeks. Poppy looked as if she’d been beaten up.

  “What-what happened to you?” Ginny thought quickly. “Were you in a car crash?”

  Poppy laughed sardonically. “Come off it, Ginny. You don’t have to act Little Miss Innocent with me. You can guess what happened. One of Svank’s goons, remember Hugo Humphrey?” She spat the name out. “He beat me up well and good.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because Svank thought blood’s thicker than water, that’s why.”

  “I don’t understand. Why weren’t you with Svank at the library?”

  Again Poppy gave the ugly laugh. “I was in the emergency ward getting my jaw fixed-”

  “So what d’you mean? Blood being thicker than water?”

  Poppy looked around nervously. “D’you live alone here?”

  “Yes, of course, I do. Why?”

  “Just wanted to be sure.” She got up and looked behind the rattan screen. “Can we lower the lights? I don’t want to be seen from the street.”

  “You can’t be, I promise you. Sit down, talk to me. Tell me-”

  “Svank found out about my brother and Alex,” Poppy blurted out, flopping back into the chair again. “Someone was following Alex and for once Alex didn’t know it; he wasn’t careful enough… someone told Svank everything…”

  Bewildered, Ginny said, “I don’t understand… Alex and your brother… what d’you mean?”

  Poppy looked at her as if she was crazy. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know Alex was gay? You gotta be kidding me. I thought you of all people would know, although it took me a while to figure it out. What I didn’t know until too late was how much a case he had on my kid brother. I introduced them one day and bingo, the next they were holed up together. Svank thought I had something to do with it, that in putting one of his lieutenants”—the sarcastic way Poppy pronounced the word showed Ginny what she thought of him—“together with my next of kin, I was double-crossing him in some way. That’s why he sent Hugo over the first time, to teach me a lesson, the flicking animal. The second time was Hugo’s own idea-after Svank’s death-sort of getting his own payback for me giving him so much trouble while the boss was alive.”

  Ginny was unable to hide what a bombshell Poppy had just dropped, and yet the minute she’d heard it she’d known there was no way to contest it, to protest. It was as if subconsciously she’d known all along, but why had Alex never told her?

  “Have you got anything to drink?” Poppy asked abruptly.

  Ginny nodded, trying to recover. There was a bottle of white wine in the fridge. How long it had been there, she couldn’t imagine, but there wasn’t anything else.

  She poured out two glasses. It looked all right. “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  “Alex asked me to meet him-”

  “I saw you-”

  “You saw us?” Poppy’s voice showed she was nervous.

  “Yes, on East Fifty-fifth Street. I chased after you, but you vanished in the crowds.” Ginny didn’t care that she was crying again. “That was the day Alex called me, the first time after the murder. Then he came to see me the day his mother died.”

  Although Ginny sounded heartbroken, Poppy was unperturbed. She looked through a vast crocodile bag for her compact and made a face at what she saw in the mirror. “That animal,” she muttered, clicking the compact shut without adding anything to her face.

  “Why did he want to see you?” Even now Ginny was ashamed to feel the same old resentment stirring, that Alex had confided in Poppy, and not her.

  “My kid brother has AIDS, Ginny,” Poppy said in a matter-of-fact voice. “It’s in remission. Alex had been paying for all kinds of expensive drugs. He told me that afternoon he was planning to get them both out of the country, but he was scared shitless… said someone was after him, although he didn’t have what they wanted anymore. Now we know he was right.”

  Poppy looked at her in a pitying sort of way. “He didn’t want me to tell you about Donny, that’s my kid brother, he knew you’d get in a panic about the AIDS problem, but once he’d gotten away he wanted me to explain. Wanted me to keep an eye on you, seemed to think you could be in danger, too. That’s why I called you.” She shook her head from side to side, her curls bobbing vigorously around her head. “It’s weird. I call you in the morning and in the evening I hear Alex got hit.”

  “Why did he think I was in danger?”

  “He was just going to tell me-we were in this coffee shop on Madison-when he got into a fucking panic… sure someone was watching him. I went to the John and when I came back he’d gone. Left me with the check, the bastard.” Poppy nodded reflectively. “Wasn’t the first time either.”

  “Did Alex kill Svank?” There, it was out There was a long silence. Ginny sat with her fingers crossed, knowing it was ridiculous, but unwilling to uncross them.

  Poppy looked around the room. “He could have…” she said finally. “He was capable of it, but I don’t know.” She jumped up to pour herself another glass of wine, drank it down in one gulp, and to Ginny’s amazement asked, “What are you making these days? I was sooo sorry not to wear that fab georgette number that night.”

  After that Ginny couldn’t wait to get rid of her. “I can’t concentrate on designing much right now… you understand, Poppy.”

  “S’pose I do.”

  She finished off the wine, and with a promise to “keep in touch” smoothed down her miniskirt and left with her usual sultry glide.

  Drained, no more tears left, Ginny hoped she’d never have to see empty-headed Poppy Gan again. How she could mention clothes in the next breath after discussing her lover’s murder was beyond her. She felt dirty, soiled by all she’d heard, no nearer the truth, other than to have it confirmed that Alex had been one of Svank’s “loo-ten-ents,” as Poppy had
put it

  On the hall table was the advance copy of Next! magazine. How shamefully she’d treated Johnny. He, not Alex, was the man who’d given her real support and love. What had Alex ever really given her? A lifetime of broken promises, culminating in putting her reputation in question and perhaps her very existence in danger.

  She took Next! back to the armchair, which was still impregnated with Poppy’s excess of Shalimar. She began to flip through the pages. Her shame grew as she read Johnny’s story about a young girl, brimming with talent and ambition; a story also told in pictures, showing her wearing her clothes at various events. Some of the pictures carried Oz’s byline. She sighed. The picture department had to get them from someone, she supposed, and here were some of the best

  It was a love letter in print; a public testimonial to her ability as a designer. It meant she would never again have to apologize for being “the crasher”; and it emphasized an originality that, wrote Johnny, “we must hope will now be recognized.” If her phone didn’t ring off the hook with offers of financial backing after this, no amount of publicity in the world could do it.

  With the magazine in her hand she went over to the phone to call Johnny. The answering service picked up. A message couldn’t convey what she had in her heart. She hung up, turning the page to find that the article concluded with two more full-length shots, one of her wearing the blush bridesmaid dress at Esme’s wedding, the other of her in the same dress, completely renovated, taken among the crowd at the Literary Lions gala.

  As she studied the two photographs, her breath quickened. She felt dizzy. In the background of the library shot was the tiny detail that had eluded her the night of the Lions dinner, the one incriminating piece of evidence she had seen fleetingly at the bottom of the stairwell, but could never remember-or identify-until now.

  There was no mistaking it. How could she have blocked it so completely out of her mind?

  She stared at the page, seeing again what she had seen on the stairwell. Luminous even in the dim light of the single bulb, she had seen what she was looking at now, a large bronze medallion, the insignia of a Literary Lion, worn around the neck of a tall, dark, slim figure, the man she had mistaken for Alex, the most famous Literary Lion of them all. It was Quentin Peet.

  Johnny’s father? Johnny’s tall, dark, slim father? The shadowy figure in the upper hall, and at the bottom of the stairwell? It wasn’t possible. Ginny threw the magazine down and walked around the loft.

  Quentin Peet had long been celebrated for his knowledge of the drug world, his exposures of those at the top in Cali. She hadn’t read his recent book, Green Ice, but she’d read enough about it to know he’d risked his life to write it Then there had been his most recent scoop. The story she’d read only the other day about the California couple in drug enforcement, the wife who’d perished in a fire, now thought to have been set by the husband, because he knew she’d learned he was getting payoffs from the drug czars.

  There were millions and millions of dollars involved in the drug business, Peet had been at pains to point out. Who knew if he wasn’t leading a double life and earning some of those millions for himself? Ginny clutched her throat. She felt she was choking with fear, but the more she thought about it, the more certain she became.

  From what Johnny had told her about his father, he was an inveterate gambler, always living beyond his considerable means; and as Johnny had said, more than once, “capable of anything.” Hadn’t Johnny told her only the other day that his father was planning to leave the paper and move to Europe to make a new life?

  He was planning his getaway.

  Oh, God, what could she do? How could she go to Johnny and tell him what had suddenly opened her eyes, her mind, her memory? Johnny, darling Johnny, living, his whole life hoping for his father’s approval. What could she do?

  There was a rush of rain against the window, a roll of thunder. A late summer storm. It emphasized how alone, how vulnerable she was. Johnny wasn’t home, but even if he had been, he was the last person she could call on for help.

  Alex hadn’t known for sure who’d been hunting him down, but he’d known she might also be in danger. Poppy’s words came back to haunt her: “He was scared shitless… knew somebody was after him, although he didn’t have what they wanted anymore.” That had to mean the Villeneva jewels. And now through Johnny, Quentin Peet knew everything about her role in hiding them.

  She had been the one to urge Johnny to ask for his father’s help in finding Alex. She must have confirmed his suspicion that Alex had the jewels.

  And when Peet found out Alex didn’t have them anymore, he killed him. She started to shake. Perhaps he thought she still knew where they were. Perhaps he’d been encouraging Johnny over the last few days to distrust her, to taint her with suspicion, so if anything happened to her, it would appear to be all part of the sinister world surrounding Svank. She was the only witness he had left to worry about He had to be waiting for the right moment to strike.

  She crept around the apartment turning out the lights, eerily methodical, with every one of her senses acutely sharp.

  Then she sat frantically thinking for several minutes, until she knew what she had to do. What any person in their right mind would have done from the start. She dialed the number on the card that had been left for the second time only a few days before.

  “Is Detective Petersh there?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Ginny Walker.” She was asked to repeat her name slowly.

  “Does he know what this is in reference to?”

  Fear gave authority to her voice. “Of course he does.”

  She was put on hold. After a few minutes another voice came on the line. “Yes, miss?”

  Be calm, Ginny, be patient; your life’s involved here. Again she asked for Petersh, “… or Detective Reever, if he’s not around.”

  Another teeth-grinding wait. “They’re not in, miss. Neither of ’em. Can you leave a message?”

  Hoping she was right and the police, if not also the FBI, were tapping her line, she took a deep breath and said loudly, “Ask one of the detectives to call me urgently. Tell them I know the identity of the man on the third floor with Svank.”

  “QP? Are you there? Pick up, if you want to know what you’ve been paying me for.”

  “Okay, Okay, here I am. What’s up?’

  Freddy Forrester, on die four RM.-to-midnight shift, in the highly technical surveillance van parked a couple of blocks south of Chelsea Park, was relieved to hear the voice of the man he called his guardian angel. QP, as he called him to his face, had been paying him well for any extra info on the Svank case and this was the first time he’d been able to deliver anything the old warrior maybe didn’t know.

  “Maybe nothing, maybe something. The Walker girl just called the precinct a minute ago, looking for Petersh or Reever. She left a message as if she wanted the world to hear it…” Forrester spelled it out slowly: “… that she knows the identity of the man on the third floor with Svank.”

  “Good work, Freddy. Over and out”

  Since his dinner with Johnny, Peet had been expecting something like this. He was blessed, or was it cursed, with a peculiar sixth sense that had rarely let him down. Ambushes, mines, booby-trap parcels, he’d survived them all, because of his personal antennae. In the last twenty years he could only think of one occasion when he’d been caught totally off guard, when the fucking Russian bastard, Svank, had started to blackmail him about his take from Colombia, and then, when taken to task, man to man at the library, had had the audacity to pull a gun on him.

  Stern’s arrest had been manna from heaven. It had given him time to plan for his future; to leave the party at the height when his reputation couldn’t go any higher and he could make the regal farewell he’d looked forward to making, taking gracefully what the paper thought was such a superb golden handshake.

  If they only understood what paupers they all were, in comparison to those in charge o
f the other world he inhabited, the underworld of Mephistopheles.

  He’d known the Stern break was too good to last, but he’d still hoped he’d be able to leave with nothing changed. Perhaps he still could.

  Freddy had said the girl made a call a minute ago. Peet looked at his watch. Nine thirty-five on a Saturday night. Knowing the two detectives involved, he was pretty sure one would be at the ball game and the other screwing his black mistress at his favorite hotel off-Broadway.

  If he played it cool, he had time to do what he had hoped he would never have to do. How Ms. Walker had suddenly had this revelation he couldn’t imagine, but he was not gambling on her making a mistake; he was gambling on getting to her first. He’d give it five to one.

  Hearing the rain outside, not for the first time he blessed the midtown building in which he’d kept a one-room pied à terre, for the past fifteen years. The elevator whooshed him down eleven floors to the basement garage. Without encountering a single raindrop, he was on his way downtown less than ten minutes after receiving Freddy’s call.

  Across the street from Ginny’s loft, Johnny, in an Avis Oldsmobile, had already seen Poppy Gan arrive and leave. It hadn’t been too much of a surprise. Seeing Ginny earlier that evening in such a nervous state, he’d known something was up. Why hadn’t she wanted him to know Gan was coming? What had Gan been delivering?

  After an absence of a few days, hoping to move things along and evaluate Ginny’s frame of mind, he’d stumbled on Gan’s visit by accident, when delivering the advance copy of the magazine. Now, his suspicions newly aroused, he feared it was a coincidence he’d live to regret. He still couldn’t believe Ginny was a crook like her cousin, didn’t want to accept it; and until this evening had been talking himself out of such a terrible idea.

  As he waited and watched, Johnny made up his mind. He wasn’t prepared to let another night go by without finding out the truth about Ginny Walker.

  It wasn’t raining so heavily when Poppy left, so he got out of the car to stand in a doorway, trying to decide exactly when to go back to the loft and take Ginny by surprise.