Losers Live Longer hcc-59

by Russell Atwood

  I concentrated on keeping my expression neutral. I had to appear the seasoned professional—seen it all—but it was a strain to keep my jaw from dropping open and repeating over and over, “Omigod.”

  “Cristy,” Elena said, “she was living with her father. He would bring her to the studio for sessions. He give her drugs before they shoot, pills, you know, make her more relaxed. Then, end of day, he take her away again. Never told nobody where they lived. But Cristy and I, between shoots, we talk, we became friends. And she told me where they lived. Then later, when George come and say he’s there to take her home…”

  “You told him.”

  She nodded.

  “It was like a movie, a spy movie. He need my help,” she said. “He choose me. No other girl, he pick me. I was in store shopping when he approach me the first time. He pretend he need my help buying soup, read the cans. He say, Oh, I’m so happy you speak English so good, can you tell me what this says? And this? And he take me down aisle where nobody is, and then he talk to me serious, say he’s gonna trust me, he’s looking for American girl and do I know her, will I help him?”

  “And you said yes.”

  “Of course I say yes. He was so clever and funny and brave. I liked him at once.” Her eyes were bright with memory, almost as if for a moment, for her, Owl was alive again.

  “All week, he say, he’d been watching the modeling agency, the girls coming and going. He look for Cristy and her father, but that week they don’t come. He don’t know where they are. So I tell him I know where she lives.”

  She smiled broadly, remembering with pride.

  “George, he say, Help me get Cristy away from her father, I tell you what to do. You frightened? Of course I’m frightened, but I say no, I want to help. So he teach me a story I’m suppose to say to her father so he’ll let Cristy go out alone. George tell me the story, make me repeat, repeat, till I get it right.

  “Then he walk with me to their apartment. He hide while I ring bell. I was so scared! But when I hear her father’s voice out the intercom, asking what I want, I know what to say, I say what George tell me: the agency want me to take Cristy out shopping, buy clothing for special pictures. I tell him they give me money for the clothes, and for him, too. He buzz me in.

  “Upstairs, father takes the money George give me for him, tell Cristy get you coat, go out with this girl, come straight back, don’t stop nowhere, understand? And Cristy nods, okay, okay, and go downstairs with me. We go four blocks, to a craft shop George showed me. As soon as we walk in, there’s George, and Cristy’s grandfather and grandmother are waiting, and they ask her, Want to come home? And she can’t speak, she cries so much, she just keep nodding, yes, yes, I wanna go home. They put her in a car, go straight to airport.

  “Then George say to me, you gotta go, too. You stay, they hurt you, ’cause you help me. I am last person Cristy’s father saw with her so I am first person he’d come looking for, to ask what happened. I’d never be safe in my country. And George, he know this, he tell Cristy’s grandma and grandpa, you get this girl out, too. They’re very rich, they get me passport, visa. Week later, I am in United States, new name, new life. Not scared. Till now. Now I am scared again. First time since I come here.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone find me,” she said. “Someone from my past. From my country, from my old life. This woman.”

  “Who?”

  She hesitated.

  “One of the older girls. I don’t remember her name.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I let it pass for now.

  “And how did she find you?”

  “I don’t know!” Elena said. “Maybe it is accident, just walking down the street. She’s here in city now and she see me and find out where I live… and she’s angry, I think she want to hurt me, because I got out while she and the others were left behind. So I call George, tell him this woman’s bothering me, ask him can you help me? And he come. I feel bad when he show up. He look so old. He don’t need my troubles, too. So I say go home, I take care of on my own, but George say, no, if you need help, I help. No way to turn him off.”

  I understood. I never could reach my off switch either.

  “So I say, Can you get this woman leave me alone? And George say, yes, we just need something on her, get some lever…”

  “Leverage,” I said.

  “Yes. And we get some. We get, and we are suppose to meet her at café, tell her what we got, George suppose to say leave Elena alone or we spill your beans. But now he’s dead…”

  Meet her at café? Well, that told me who the woman was. “That’s what the meeting at Yaffa was supposed to be about?” I said. “Telling this woman to stay away from you?”

  She nodded. “We were going to go together. But when I didn’t hear from George, I didn’t go.”

  “Instead you sent your boyfriend, Jeff?”

  “You know?”

  “I was there. I saw him follow Sayre Rauth.”

  “Sayre…? That what she call herself here? You meet her?”

  “I have.”

  She tilted her chin at me. “And are you working for her?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you collecting this for her?” And she nodded toward the black plastic bag on the floor, the one she’d tried to hand me when I came to the door.

  “A man named Paul Windmann hired me.”

  She smiled.

  “Oh, Windmann. Did he enjoy his nap?”

  “So that was you then? The woman he picked up and took back to his place?”

  “Yes. It was George’s plan. How we get the lever edge.”

  Elena beamed as she described how Owl had cleverly arranged it all. Setting up Windmann, providing the roofie, so they could steal his keys and break into Rauth Realty’s townhouse, where Windmann worked as her second-in-command. George, bless his 84-year-old heart, had done the actual break-in. I could almost hear him crowing about it, chuckling over how he’d neither lost his touch nor fallen behind the times in terms of tools. Once he’d gotten inside, he’d plugged an ordinary iPod into the USB port on her computer and used it to siphon information off her hard drive. The iPod that lay at the bottom of the black plastic bag. The iPod Windmann had hired me to get back for him.

  “But Elena,” I said, turning the plastic bag over in my hand, “if you and George stole her files so you’d have something to hold over her head, why did you agree to sell them back to Windmann? Why were you ready to hand them over to me at the door?”

  “Because everything’s gone wrong!” Elena said. “I can’t reach George, I don’t know where he is, he don’t call…I’m scared again. Maybe something happen to him, maybe if I stay something gonna happen to me. I know I have to go, run, get away. But for that I need money. So I contact Windmann and I sell the files back to him. Only thing I have left to sell, Mr. Sherwood. I’m not eleven anymore.”

  She stopped talking. The silence pressed down on her. On both of us.

  “I need to know,” she said finally. “Did George suffer? Was he in any pain? How…”

  “He was dead by the time I got to him,” I said. “Less than a minute. He’d hit his head badly. I think it killed him instantly. I don’t think he suffered.”

  Her face went waxy pale and she ran for the bathroom door. She was sick.

  I took the iPod out of the plastic bag and powered it up. Brought up the menu. The device had a 40 gigabyte memory, but only one song was listed on the screen. One song, when a machine like this can hold ten thousand. What was on the rest of the machine’s memory? What sort of files had Owl found?

  I set the bag aside and looked around the apartment. I opened the writing desk’s drawer. Inside were pens, loose change, utility bills addressed to L. Andrews, pink parking garage ticket stubs probably belonging to the boyfriend.

  Hanging over the desk’s chair was a pair of grease-stained coveralls with the name “Jeff” stitched on them. Through the open closet door I could see another couple p
airs hanging. I turned to the bookshelf Elena had pointed to earlier. Not searching for any particular title, just allowing my eyes to take them all in. One book on the third shelf down stuck out half an inch farther than all the others in the same row. Its spine was brown.

  I pulled it out the rest of the way. It was a tall book titled The Complete Guide to Tristan and Isolde. Isolde. As in Enterprises, as in… I opened the cover and there in the upper corner of the first endpage was the owner’s name written in blue ink: “Lawrence J. Addison.” Law Addison.

  And Michael Cassidy was the woman Addison had run off with when he skipped out on bail. The same Michael Cassidy who’d had a key to this apartment…

  I could almost feel the gears shifting into place.

  Owl wouldn’t just have recognized her when she walked in on them—he’d have made the connection between her and her fugitive boyfriend. If Michael Cassidy is back here in New York, he’d have thought, Addison’s probably with her, or not far behind. Or at least she’d probably know where he was.

  So Owl must’ve confronted her, told her he knew who she was, told her that if he’d recognized her other people would, too; he’d have convinced Michael Cassidy that if someone was trying to kill her and she wanted to stay out of sight she’d be better off going with him than trying to hide on her own. It was something people said Owl had always been able to do, persuading people, getting them to follow his lead. It had been one of his strengths as a private eye, and now that he was a harmless-looking old man it must’ve been even easier for him—he could play on people’s sympathy, and even the most beautiful young woman wouldn’t worry about his intentions, about going back to this nice old man’s hotel room.

  I noticed that the sounds of Elena’s retching had ceased.

  I went and looked into the bathroom. She was asleep on the bathroom floor, curled next to the porcelain toilet.

  I looked at her cut arm. The blood-soaked t-shirt was brown now, not red.

  I let her sleep.

  With the black plastic bag in my hand and the hardcover copy of the Complete Guide to Tristan and Isolde under my arm, I walked out of the apartment, letting the door swing closed behind me.

  I’d come looking for answers. I’d found some, but now I also had a heap more questions. That was life, the deck was stacked; always the questions outnumbering the answers.

  The corridor to the vestibule and the street door looked marginally different than when I had gone into the apartment. The telephone directories had been pushed aside and both doors shut. It was relatively quiet cut off from the street noise.

  Daylight from the partially open courtyard door still came from beneath the slant of the stairwell, but I no longer heard the sound of the garden hose rinsing out trash barrels.

  Before I left, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get some more information about Mr. Andrew from Luis. That’s what I thought.

  I started for the courtyard door and reached out a hand to push it farther open, but from the corner of my eye I saw something that registered as completely wrong.

  Under the stairwell were more stairs, in shadow, leading down to a storage basement. A man was on them, but he was neither ascending nor descending, he was lying prone.

  His workboots were toes-up on the top step, his head was awkwardly bent back over the seventh step down. Below his chin was a vivid, frown-shaped welt across his throat. Blood on his lips and red drool in his chin stubble. He was looking up, only he wasn’t looking, not anymore. Nevermore.

  It was disorienting for a second, like meeting someone face-to-face on an Escher staircase: going up/coming down? coming up/going down? Maybe he was really standing up and I was the one lying down.

  Then, no maybe about it. The slant of daylight from the courtyard changed shape, the rhomboid widening. I turned, but not quick enough. Something crashed down on my head and I fell forward.

  Last thing I was aware of: a steely sound, a sound like a roulette wheel at the moment when the croupier drops the ball in—No more bets, Mesdames et Monsieurs—and I was that shiny steel ball sent spinning in its narrow track, round and round and round, until finally I slowed and bounced and tumbled and landed in the double zero.

  Chapter Eleven: INCH-HIGH PRIVATE EYE

  I came to, not in darkness but gauzy half-light, wondering why my head hurt so much and why the mattress was so lumpy: what was it stuffed with, juice boxes and chicken bones?

  I was lying on top of the dead man, the both of us in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs. I scrambled off him. I must’ve landed on top and ridden him like a sled down the remaining flight of steps.

  I crouched in a shadowy corner half-seated on a plastic rat trap, a black pentagon full of poison, staring up at the glare of daylight at the top of the stairs. No one was up there—whoever had hit me was gone—but I still gave it a minute or so before I moved again.

  I looked over at the dead man. The super, Luis. The musty air of the chalky cellar was overlapped by the cloying vapor of alcohol. His bottle of tequila had broken, either in his fall or in cushioning mine.

  Death has a stillness all its own, unmistakable for either stupor or sleep; by comparison the paint peeling off the walls was moving at a fast clip. All the same, I reached over and checked for a pulse just to make sure. Nothing.

  I patted down his pockets and found a wad of bills in a money clip. A quick fan approximated it at eighty bucks. So not a robbery then, or at least not a successful one.

  I tried to put the money back in the same pocket. It wouldn’t go. Just one of the reasons you’re not supposed to touch anything at a crime scene: things never go back the way they were. I slipped it into his breast pocket instead.

  I stood, the wall at my back guiding me up.

  I looked down at Luis. Another dead old man, my second that day, only this one wasn’t an accident, at least not in the strictest sense of the word; someone had crushed his windpipe. It made me consider again Owl’s accident and how strict that had been as well.

  I brushed myself off. I touched the back of my pants. My gun was still tucked there in the waistband. As I climbed the stairs, halfway up I found the plastic bag I’d taken from Elena. The iPod was still inside it, so it wasn’t all bad news.

  But the book I’d been carrying was gone. Whoever hit me had stolen The Complete Guide to Tristan and Isolde. Unless, of course, the book belonged to the person who hit me, then that wouldn’t be stealing.

  I peered into the courtyard and the hallway but no one was around. I listened and thought and made a decision. I went back to apartment three. Though it had been closed when I left it, the door was open a crack now. With gun in hand—safety off—I opened it farther.

  There was no one inside, living or dead. Signs of decampment and a hasty retreat. Closet door and dresser drawers hung open. Stray clothes on the floor that hadn’t been there before. The pair of coveralls that had been draped over the chair was one of the things now missing.

  With a murdered man within shouting distance down in the basement, I didn’t want to spend any more time looking around.

  But I did stop and pick up the phone. I pressed the redial button. On the other end, a phone rang and rang and no one answered, until finally on the twelfth ring an answering machine picked up: “You’ve reached E-Z Parking Garage with accommodations available for short-and long-term parking. We’re located at 446 East Tenth Street at the corner of Avenue D. The attendant is currently busy assisting another customer, but please leave a message and someone will get back to you.”

  I hung up without leaving a message, got the dial tone, then punched in *69 to get the number of the last incoming call. The call had come in at 1:12 pm and had a 212 area code. I wrote it on the back of a Con Edison bill addressed to L. Andrews.

  The need to leave the building was building inside me like an uncontrollable urge. For all I knew whoever had hit me had also called the cops.

  I drew the apartment door almost shut behind me, leaving it the way I’d found i
t, open just that crack, and went down the corridor to the entryway and street doors.

  I didn’t stop to look back down at Luis but said a brief prayer for him in Spanish, pretty much the only Spanish I know. Vaya con Díos.

  A block away I stopped at a payphone, dialed the local precinct, and anonymously reported a dead man in the basement of 27 Avenue C.

  I walked home to the office, feeling a little nauseous and hoping it was a delayed reaction to my spooning a corpse and not an early warning sign of a concussion. A thick skull had always been my one saving grace, as well as a damning constant.

  The case was coming together, I felt it wriggling in my hands like a newborn living thing, viscous and slick, squirming to get away from me. I needed to swallow a couple aspirin, smoke a cigarette, then sit down in my thinking chair and get a good grip.

  Two people were standing outside the street door of my building when I arrived. A man and a woman in their twenties, both slender and of average height, dressed like upwardly mobile professionals; the man in a light-gray Ralph Lauren summer suit, the woman in a knee-length blue silk dress that could’ve come straight from the Fifth Avenue storefront windows of Lord & Taylor. The buzzer they were pushing was mine.

  Shit, my three o’clock appointment with the couple who wanted the background check on their prospective nanny—what were their names again?—Mr. and Mrs. Dough.

  Was it three o’clock already? Where does the day go?

  I wasn’t in the mood for Ken and Barbie and considered blowing ’em off, going someplace to get a cup of coffee until they tired of waiting, but I relented. My mom would never forgive me, turning away work.

  “Good afternoon, sorry I’m late.”

  “Mr. Sherwood?” the young woman asked. Her husband was talking on a Bluetooth plugged into his ear.

  “Yes. Mrs. Dough?”

  She reached out her hand to take mine. Hers was a slender, soft, firm hand and she held mine for longer than I expected.