“Hanging out on Facebook?” she asked.
“They don’t let me. Honesty is not the best policy in journalism, apparently. It landed me here in a box in the middle of the night.”
“What do they have you looking for?”
“You.”
“You should get a promotion now.”
“Not if you came knocking looking for Snap Peas.” He held out a bag of green crunchies.
She was starving.
“Who you been kissing?” he asked.
Her hand shot to her mouth, but she ended up getting green snack dust all over her cheek.
“Raw lips.” He chuckled. “Big tell. We know you don’t have a boyfriend besides that kid who writes for the New Yorker. You know he’s sleeping with the Caston Bleach heiress, right?”
Oh, Tofu was an heiress. That was just freaking rich.
“Yeah. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Huh. If you say so.”
She could almost see him making a note in a little book in his head. “So, what made you think I was involved in the Park Avenue kerfuffle?”
“Your boyfriend’s name came up in the arrest records. We get all that on the ticker.” He pointed at something on the screen that looked like a Twitter feed. “He’s been arrested before. Never misses a ‘nonviolent’ protest neither. His commie lawyer’ll have him out in the morning. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
He tilted his head like she must be lying or crazy or both. But in the world of people she knew or had ever met, Stu was the person she was least likely to worry about. He brought self-sufficiency and practicality to new levels daily.
“Stu really got Rolf Wente good,” she continued. “Even though he’s a size or two bigger. Rolf, I mean.”
“That’s the only lick you’re ever gonna get. That guy’s got some lawyers, and they ain’t pinkos. They’re barracudas.” He rubbed his fingers together to indicate that they were the most expensive predatory fish in the city. “Family, you know. They kicked him out, but funnel him cash. My kid did what he done, I woulda thrown a nickel at him, then kicked him to the curb. Possibly I’d’ve killed him myself if no one held me back.”
“What did he do?”
“You could look it up yourself. It ain’t no secret. Least not in East Germany. Eastern Germany.”
“I’ve never been.”
“Want a soda? I got Manhattan Special and Manhattan Special.”
“No, thanks.”
He pulled a bottle of chocolate soda from the mini fridge and bent the cap back with a little metal opener he had attached to his wrist with a plastic spiral. “Nasty business, it was. And dumb. Just unnecessary. Skinhead gang breaks into a family house, ties the father down, and makes him watch as they rape the wife and daughters. Which is ugly enough. Then they’re about to kill the lot when they realize there was a brother, who had gone and got the police. So, that didn’t go well for them. Whole country wants to string them up. And they did. You look a little green, there. You all right?”
She had been considering her broken arm and how meaningless and stupid it was, and how little it hurt. She’d forget it in a couple of months. “Rolf was one of them?”
“Well, no. But the father, who was Jewish, so you know it all looked like regular skinhead nonsense, had some business with Rolf. And Rolf, who was all skinhead, had this habit of beating girls near to death as it was. Got off not once, but twice. He happened to be in charge of those guys, more or less. Now Rolf denies he put in the order to kill or rape anyone, but the prosecutor’s just uncovering more and more connections with the Jewish dad.”
“Wait. What kind of business?”
“That was the funny thing. It was flowers out of The Netherlands. But not the flowers. The whaddya call it?” He made a fist.
“Bulbs?”
“Supposedly. The prosecutor’s getting his suit on for a big press conference because he says he’s got him. The cops are outside the mansion waiting for him to say they got Rolf on murder and the business, which is so bad, by the way, the Jewish dad is talking about dropping charges against the skinheads. Then, dontcha know?”
“The prosecutor is dead.”
“Found him in a pool of vomit.”
Laura gasped.
Roscoe continued, “But it was ruled an accident because they found his dinner from the night before, and the onions in it were chopped up bulbs. Accident. Supposedly happens all the time.”
Laura suddenly remembered the boxes of bulbs in her backyard. The last time she had seen them, she was beating up Cangemi for not respecting a woman’s right to starve herself. “Narcissus bulbs are poisonous.”
“Right. But before you go pulling a rabbit out of your ass, there’s not enough to kill a person in what he had there. The Wente family pulled strings to get it ruled an accident, then they disowned Rolf with a few mil’ in a bank account. He blew through it already. We don’t know how he’s surviving.”
Laura sat stock-still, staring into the distance.
Roscoe leaned forward. “Now, you wanna tell me what you was doin’ on Park Avenue at ten at night when you’d usually be at work?”
She felt she owed him something for unabashedly giving so much information she did not have the brains or resources to find for herself. “Rolf and the Jewish dad weren’t trading bulbs. The flowers were girls. Women. People. Look into the Pandora Agency. I have to go.”
Laura tore into the house. Ruby was sleeping on the couch in her clothes, and Mom was nowhere to be seen. She went into the broom closet and took things out with one arm, dropping brooms, throwing catalogs, flinging a metal pail, pushing too many bottles of cleaning products out of the way at once. She made so much racket, Ruby woke up.
“Finally,” Laura said. “I thought you were dead in there. Help me with the floor.”
“What are you looking for?”
“You made Thomasina breakfast the morning she died?”
“Yeah?”
“You made her a Momlette?”
“Yeah?” Ruby said. “She puts this stuff called Maggi on them. Put. In the past.”
“And you ate some?”
“Yeah?”
“Which is why you were sick. You’ve got a basket of shallots in the pantry. Could one of them be one of Mom’s bulbs? The ones she was planting? Because if you accidentally cut one up and put it in the Momlette, there would be poison on your counter.”
“Wait. Okay. I have leftovers in my fridge. They’ll be there tomorrow. So stop.”
Laura froze, realizing she was trying to satisfy her own curiosity instead of taking the best care of her sister.
Ruby helped put everything back as it was, then closed the closet door with a final snap. “Go to bed,” she said. “Your eyes have big black circles under them, and your skin is green. And you have a broken arm. Go.”
“Let me call Cangemi first.”
“I’ll do it. Go. You make me crazy. Please.” Ruby pushed her up the stairs, to the bedroom.
Laura didn’t have the energy to resist.
CHAPTER 21.
Laura was awakened at 8:11 by the squawk of radios downstairs.
For reasons she couldn’t quite pin down, she didn’t want to go down in her pajama pants and yesterday’s shirt. She got out some fresh clothes. That made her realize how much she needed a shower after yesterday, which had gone on forever. But she couldn’t bathe because her waterproof cast was days away.
She sponged herself off and dressed in something sleeveless, knowing the reason she didn’t want to look like a slob was because Detective Cangemi was probably down there, and the more wisecracks she could avoid, the better. That was the story she told herself, and she was sticking to it.
By the time she got downstairs, the squawking had ended, and any extra personnel in the house were gone. Laura knocked on Ruby’s door. The keys were in the lock, and the police tape was gone.
The smell of cleaning fluids pinched the inside of her nose
. Ruby was still scrubbing the counter in abrasive chemicals, her four-inch stilettos giving her that extra angle she needed to really take the finish off the countertop.
“Here are your keys,” Laura said.
“Thanks.”
“You’re in full makeup and a Halston jacket. Why are you cleaning?”
“I was out the door, and I just had to give it one more pass.” She stepped back from her work. “Do you think it’s gone?”
“I think you should just get Jimmy to replace the counter.”
“He is. But I can’t even stand having it in here.” She tossed the sponge, and Laura wondered at what point in the previous eight hours Ruby had spoken to their landlord.
“I think Rolf killed his sister,” Laura said. “He was using her organization to traffic girls since the Jewish guy wasn’t doing it anymore, and she was going to stop him.”
“What Jewish guy?”
Laura explained as Ruby put her cleaning products away, leaving out the parts that made her nauseous.
Ruby snapped up her keys. “He would have needed to see her in the morning, and he didn’t. She would have mentioned it because she couldn’t stand him and bitched about it all the day before. I mean, she loved him.” She turned to the door. “Can we go to the station together? Are you ready to go? Do you need help with your bag?” She took Laura’s bag, teetered, then slung it over her shoulder. “What the hell do you have in here?”
“Fall inspiration. I’m meeting with Ivanah.”
“Good luck. I really have to be in the showroom today. We’re having Barneys Co-op again, and I need to be totally, like, early and present. Did you know Debbie Hayworth is their buyer? I’m selling her some clothes; I promise you. Today is the day.”
She seemed to have forgotten there was ever a hip little creep named Darren in her past. Laura wanted to tell her that the way to get on Debbie Hayworth’s good side wasn’t to wear four-inch stilettos and full makeup. Wearing super-slimming Marni pants and having a pile of hair that dropped in place like an obedient child wasn’t the way to Debbie’s heart, nor was the marble skin or flat stomach. If Ruby could have put on twenty pounds, failed to wash her hair for a week, and knocked out a tooth, she may have had a chance of Debbie’s order-writing pen. But as it was, she was walking into disaster, and Laura had neither the heart nor means to tell her why. The information would have done nothing but make her sister nervous. So instead, she built a case around Rolf on the walk to the train station.
“He did it,” Laura said, staring down the stairs, which would be a huge pain with her arm in a sling. She wasn’t interested in falling down the stairs because she couldn’t hold onto the rail with her right hand, but traveling a crowded staircase on the left was the depth of ignorant slum behavior. “Whoever was in that cab with her killed her, and Rolf was in that cab.”
Since they were raised by the same mother, with the same life lessons, Ruby offered her arm and helped with Laura’s MetroCard, then slipped her own with a sleek push at the turnstile with her hip.
“He hijacked White Rose, and Thomasina got mad,” Laura said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so,” Ruby said.
“Huh?”
“He loved her.” Ruby helped Laura down the second flight of stairs. “He was a beast, but he was this total big brother. Always protecting her.”
“So?” Laura was getting a tight feeling in her chest, which meant she felt threatened. “If she was so willing to pay your rent without a fuss, she was probably doing the same for him and thought nothing of it. So she probably let him get deeply involved in her stuff to give him something to do and a paycheck, and he screwed her. And maybe she only found out, like, the day before, so she didn’t mention it to you.”
“She would have said something.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“Why should I have to?” Ruby sighed. “Look, pretending she wouldn’t have told me about that or about meeting him before she went to the Ghetto, well, to me, it’s just unlikely. We talked a lot.”
When they got to the platform, Ruby flung herself onto a bench, flipping her hair as if Laura didn’t know she’d been having a nervous breakdown the day before.
Laura stood over her. “Corky saw Rolf that morning in the park. I bet he was in the cab with her. He had opportunity.”
“So did every model and agent and piece of eurotrash hanging out at Marlene X, which you have no proof Thomasina even went to anyway. Yesterday, you were convinced she was meeting Roquelle Rik, and she was the killer. Today, what?”
Laura plopped her bag onto Ruby’s lap and pulled it open as if she wanted to split it in two, except she only had one good arm, so it kind of opened and kind of flopped over. She didn’t know why she was so angry. Was it because she was being lambasted for changing her mind? Or because she’d spent all that time away from work and she’d been wrong? Or because she’d gotten Ruby out of danger without finding the killer? Or was it the ugliest reason of all… that when Ruby came up with ideas, Laura stopped feeling superior?
Laura pulled the rolled-up roll of receipt copies from her bag and tore through them with her teeth and the tips of the fingers on her right hand as if she had three seconds to answer a question with one arm. She finally found the one she was searching for and handed it to Ruby. “The receipt for Marlene X. Skinny latte with soymilk and a pump of something it doesn’t say. And a drip coffee, which I have no idea who it was for.”
Ruby just handed it back. “It doesn’t say her brother was with her. I’m not saying he didn’t do it. I’m saying you don’t have enough to back it up, and you won’t. And also, it’s not important. Laura, listen.” Ruby took her by the wrists even though one was fully encased. “I am so grateful you helped me. I was in such trouble, and I was so depressed. And you pulled me out. You did things no other sister would do. I love you. I appreciate you. Can you please not be mad at me?”
“I’m not mad.”
But she was. A little. Maybe a lot. And her anger didn’t stem from anything she could explain. She wanted to be the hero and had succeeded in execution, but failed in scope. She stuck the papers in her right fingertips, and Ruby helped her open the bag. As she transferred the paper from right to left hand, a whipping breeze came from the tunnel. It was a strong breeze, the kind that came before the rumbling of the arriving train, and it came without warning, grabbing the receipt copies and blowing them all over the station.
Ten pages fluttered like paper bags. Laura caught one that flattened itself against the side of a baby stroller. She smiled at the mother, then eyed the situation. The platform was crowded. The papers were everywhere, and few passengers even noticed that the flying pages weren’t garbage. Ruby bent to scoop up two, then chased another one as it scuttled along the platform, grabbing it by the edge. Laura tried to catch one in midair, but her right arm was unwilling to follow her brain’s instructions by snapping her cast, so she reached with her left hand and missed. The woman with the baby stroller must have had warm feelings from Laura’s unsolicited smile because she plucked it out of the air and handed it over.
“Thanks!” Laura said.
Mother pointed. “There are two over there.”
Laura nodded and went for them, but everyone was in her way and the arrival of the eastbound train increased the breeze. Her busted arm wasn’t helping either. It threw her off balance and disabled her ability to grab anything on her right side. As a result, she lost three pages to the tracks and another to the ceiling.
Ruby appeared, lipstick barely smudged, but panting nonetheless. “I got four.”
“I got two,” Laura replied as the doors slid open. “Thanks.”
The page with Penelope Sidewinder’s number was present, but the page with the Marlene X receipt was gone.
“You still have everything from that morning,” Ruby said, shuffling through the pages.
“No, Marlene X is missing. They were all on the same p
age.”
“What’s this, then?”
She handed Laura a paper. It had a taxi receipt from that morning, but it had been so deep in the wee hours, she’d put it with the receipts from the day before.
“There’s a twenty-four dollar surcharge,” Laura said.
“LaGuardia,” Ruby offered. “They started charging two dollars more for LaGuardia last month.”
“It has the last four digits of the credit card.” Laura scrambled for the copy of the cards. It had been rescued. She scanned it. The digits matched the Amex Black. “Rolf is Sabine Fosh. That’s why he wanted her wallet. She took his cards when they met at the Ghetto. And that message on her phone, I don’t remember the time, he was saying wecken ick eeber eer. Which means, I don’t know, what?”
Ruby, ever useful, pulled out her phone. “She used to freak me out with the German, so I got this translator.”
A hot breeze blew in from the Manhattan-bound tunnel. The commuters packed up their things and drifted toward the edge of the platform, where they’d get too close, daring the train to take their faces off. Laura needed another minute of delay while Ruby said, “Wecken ick eeber eer” into the phone.
As the train sped into the station, Ruby held up the phone, the screen glowing with the words, Wake up! I got her!
But who was her?
Ruby went to Broadway, and Laura walked west to the 40th Street office, where Ivanah would be waiting in fifteen minutes. She was unprepared at best and out of her depth at worst. She tried to keep her mind on the task at hand. In a couple of hours, she could find out more about Rolf, or the poison, or something. All she had to do was think about line, color, and shape until ten thirty, latest. Then she’d break with them before she was forced to have lunch. Ruby and Corky would call, but she’d pretend she was busy helping Jeremy with his show.
What she intended to do was try and put this thing to bed by the end of the day. She had a feeling of power and competence in murder-solving that she hadn’t felt since she quit working full time at Jeremy St. James, and she needed to keep that fire burning. She hadn’t realized how depressed she’d been.
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