Losers Live Longer hcc-59

by Russell Atwood

  That’s as far as my imagination took me. But other new factors had to be taken into account. Luis’ murder was one. Had Addison also returned to the apartment, been spotted by his good friend the super? Luis would’ve made a big noise about that, a noise Addison couldn’t afford being heard. That strike across Luis’ throat suggested that silencing him may have been a motive or intent in the man’s death.

  Finally to Matt I said, “No.”

  To hell with him, it was my case now. And it was breaking.

  He must’ve read my mind. “Same to you, pal.”

  “Pal? You’re only here because I might have a lead on something that would look good on you. Don’t pretend you’re doing me any favors. Do your own damn spadework. I’m busy.”

  “What about that client?”

  “What client?” I’d lost track.

  “The one who turned up on your doorstep, what’s his story? Think he might’ve been sent here by Michael Cassidy? To feel you out?”

  “Separate affair. I do have other jobs you know. And I’m on the clock, so if you don’t have anything else to peddle me…”

  “I’ll pedal you, I’ll land the whole bike on your head. Go on, Payton, go it alone. But remember when you blow it, it won’t be me you’ll be entertaining with your wit. The cops’ll want to know why you withheld information on a couple of wanted fugitives.”

  “And who’ll tell ’em, Matt? Not you, right?”

  He said nothing, just leveled a bland gaze on me.

  I asked, “What’s the reward for information leading to his capture or arrest? How much does Metro stand to pocket?”

  He stood up from the edge of my desk, the sudden displacement of weight jarring the pens and pencils cup, spilling them over again.

  He shook his head.

  “Call me when you calm down. There’s no talking to you when you get cranky like this. I think you need your nap.”

  His nap-time jab reminded me of what I’d forgotten to say to him before.

  “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Huh?”

  “I heard you’re a father now. Boy or a girl?”

  “Yeh,” he said and walked all the way to the door before he stopped. He didn’t turn around, he spoke looking up toward the ceiling.

  “I’ve got a son.”

  “That’s great, Matt. And how’s Jeanne doing?”

  “Fine. She’s digging being a mommy. I think it gives her something she was missing for a long time.”

  “And you? Gives you something too?”

  Matt’s shoulders bunched up, like maybe he was laughing silently, or crying.

  Then he said, “Hey, Payton, remember that geek who used to work over at Metro. The one used to fix the copier when it—”

  “Chuck R. Dyer,” I said. I’d just been thinking about him that morning and his picture in Time magazine.

  “Yeh, him. That’s the one. Chucky. I used to call him Chucky all the time, after that movie. You know, that cocksucker’s a fucking billionaire now?”

  “Yeh, I did know.”

  “It got to me. Knowing that, you know, that this pisser who used to come in and sanitize the phones at my job—he’s a fucking billionaire. And what do I got?—hemorrhoids!”

  I snickered, couldn’t help it.

  Matt went on. “You know for a while I used to tell that little anecdote exactly the way I told you just now. Always got a laugh, too. Then one day, I’m having one of my liquid lunches with a client, and I tell it to this guy. And he starts giggling, sort of sputtering. And it hits me like an aluminum bat, he’s laughing at me. This fucker’s laughing at me. I wanted to crush his fuckin’ face in, ya know?”

  “Dale Carnegie would be proud.”

  “Only it was me. I told the story, I made this guy laugh at me. Made me want to crush my own face in. So I stopped telling that story. Stopped drinking until I passed out every night. Checked myself into this detox clinic a cousin of mine runs upstate. I got off the booze for good.”

  I was sorry to hear that, not for his sake, but for nostalgia’s. Some of my fondest memories from working at Metro were of our bull sessions at the local bar after a case had wrapped. I’d enter, weak and weary, and Matt—he still had his mustache back then—would already be at a table with two dark, frothy pints of stout in front of him. I’d walk over, saying, “Good idea.” And he’d grin in wide-eyed innocence, and reply, “Oh? Did you want one, too?”

  But those days were gone. Soon I’d be alone with only my own vices for company. Made me wonder—were all the sad, solitary drunks in bars merely social drinkers who’d lost their society?

  Matt continued, “Giving up drinking saved my fucking marriage. Jeanne was threatening to leave me—she didn’t want to raise a child in an alcoholic home. That’s what finally did it. Becoming a father changes things. Changes everything.”

  “So I hear.”

  He waved his hand down through the air, like he was fanning away a fart that blew back on him.

  “You don’t get it, Payton. The point of the story is—”

  “There’s a point? Cool.”

  “Would you listen?”

  I said nothing. It reminded me of another of Matt’s old axioms that he’d drilled into me at Metro: Whenever you look, see; when you listen, hear.

  Matt said, still not turning to face me, “Life’s not a joke, Payton. But your life can be a joke. Stop joking around. Before it’s too late.” And on that upbeat note, he left me.

  I sat and thought, but not about what he’d said. My brain was ticking away on Law Addison. There had to be a nice big reward for information leading to his capture. The kind of money people would do anything for, and—I admit it—I’m people. I thought it would be fun to collect. On top of that, it’d be a Botox shot to my sagging practice if I brought him in.

  But Matt was right, I didn’t know enough to figure this out on my own, how it all fit together. I didn’t have the resources at my fingertips. But I knew someone who did, and she was home. I could hear the clomp of her boots above my ceiling.

  Chapter Thirteen: BURNING BRIDGES

  I went upstairs to Tigger’s door, knocked, and answered her “Who’s there?” with “Me, returning your set of keys.”

  The door opened.

  She said in a hushed voice, “Quiet, everyone’s sleeping. Nana and papa fell asleep on Rue’s floor by her bed. Retz nodded off on the can, so shhh.”

  As soon as I saw her, I got a lump in my throat.

  She’d been my neighbor in this top-story loft apartment for over ten years, was here when I moved in. We’d had an instant connection, pals at first sight. Maybe if I’d been younger, I’d’ve tried to make it more. But she was seventeen at the time and I was too old for her. Funny I used to think twenty-eight was too old.

  I still didn’t know the whole story of how she’d come to New York City, she’d never put forth the information, but she’d dropped enough hints for me to sketch in the outlines. She’d come to the city at fourteen or fifteen, running away from a home life that made resting her head on the hard edge of a sidewalk a more comfortable cushion. She’d mixed with rough people in those early years and become one herself. She began working raves when she was sixteen; it turned out she had a natural talent as a techie. By the time I moved in she was going on eighteen and already had her union card, working Broadway shows in the city and sometimes on tour.

  Deeper than that I’d never dug. I deliberately avoided it. Tigger knew what I did for a living, invading people’s pasts and ferreting out the truth. It was work in the pursuit of which you developed certain “skills” of mistrust, deceit, emotional insulation, and healthy paranoia. But what’s healthy professionally can be poison in a friendship. Stay in the business long enough and these skills harden into personality traits you can no longer turn on and off. After a while, you can’t meet someone new without dissecting them; you start assuming all the faces you meet are masks.

  But I had never done that with Tigger
. And never wanted to. Somehow it was important having one person in my life I didn’t treat as suspect, not even the least-likely variety.

  Of course we’d also both been young back then, and the temptation to probe hadn’t been so great. The past hadn’t been that important to us; too much was going on in the now that needed sorting out. But soon the past was all I would have of her.

  She must’ve seen some of the thought on my face, because her bushy brows knitted.

  I swallowed the lump and forced a smile. Be happy. I needed her help, not her sympathy. And most of all I needed her computer.

  Tigger had a much more sophisticated computer setup than I ever would—a NASA console by comparison. The whole thing was separately powered by a solar panel unit she’d mounted up on the roof. Con Ed never saw a penny. She could set up shop on a desert island, that one.

  In the past year, after becoming a new mother, she’d quit working in theater and turned to graphic design, something she could do from home. She’d been successful at it, too. Too successful. It was enabling her to buy a house in the country and leave the city, and everyone still in it, behind.

  Part of my discomfort over losing Tigger was selfish: I used her on a regular basis as a sounding board and procurer of information. She was my Huggy Bear. She knew parts of this city I didn’t know existed and the sort of people who inhabited them. I would miss that almost as much as I’d miss her.

  To make up for that impending deficit, I was going to wring as much out now as I could.

  She must have seen the greed in my eyes.

  “Is this for a case? Finally got a client?”

  A client? Just to show her up, I gave her a tally of my clients so far that day. Four in all. If she was shocked, her face didn’t betray it. She was the quintessential New Yorker, never batting an eyelash. Though she did squint hard when I was telling her about Mr. and Mrs. Dough knocking my stuffing out and interrupted me to ask, “Wait, is this true?”

  “Dunno, I’m just telling you what happened.”

  I stopped giving her the rundown of my day at the point where Matt walked out, for fear of lapping myself.

  “Four clients in one day,” I said. “That’s more than I’ve had all year. And it all started with George Rowell. Everything that’s happened…there’s got to be something that connects it all. I can’t chalk it up to coincidence.”

  I got no argument from her. I was a little disappointed. Never could anticipate what her reaction was going to be, but usually she was contrary.

  This time she said, “You’re right. There is something that connects all these things. Links all of them together.”

  That tone of voice—complete conviction, complete self-confidence…she saw something, she knew the answer! I could feel my heart start thudding like a boot kicking the back of my chair in study hall.

  I asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s you, Payton,” she said. “You’re the connection. Your perception frames them all and imposes a pattern, which precludes you from ever perceiving them as what they might well be, merely a random set of unrelated events.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was a letdown. “Well, thank you, sensei. But that doesn’t really help me.”

  “I call ’em as I see ‘em,” she said, and leaned back in her rolling chair. “So let’s get to the important part: Which of these women is it that’s got you panting?”

  “What?”

  “Come off it, I’ve seen that look in your eye before, like the pilot light’s gone on. You don’t get that look over a man. Only a woman. And not an ugly one either. So give—is it Little Miss Pilates with the nice bum and the fake name or is it the Suicide Girl with the Ninotchka accent and the scars?”

  I gave. “Neither,” I said. “It’s the bad guy.” I’d told her about following Sayre Rauth from Yaffa and then speaking to her outside her townhouse, but I’d confined myself to the what, where, and when. This time around, I added in the how. And what a how it was. I hadn’t realized how much she’d made my blood boil or how obvious it was that she had. Tigger smiled as I told her of the effect Ms. Rauth had had on me.

  “Who’d’ve thought one of the city’s hottest women would be working as a realtor?” she said. “Not one of your top ten sexiest jobs. Which firm did you say she’s with?”

  “I didn’t say. She’s got her own, Rauth Realty. That’s what the townhouse is, their office.”

  Tigger’s smile vanished. “No such company.”

  I grinned. “Sez you. I was there a few hours ago.”

  Tigger shook her head resolutely. 99% of the time there was no arguing with her, because 98% of the time she was right.

  “I know all the registered realtors in the area. Trust me, for the last year I’ve been talking to half of them, the other half I e-mailed. And I never heard of a Rauth Realty, at least not here in the city. Certainly not in this neighborhood.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe I got the spelling wrong. Or maybe she’s not registered.”

  “Uh-huh. You want to tell me a little more about what she’s like?”

  “I…she…”

  “Oh, so it’s like that, huh? Well, be careful, Payton, you know how you get. Don’t stick your neck out too far over her—or any of your other parts that are liable to get chopped off.”

  “Don’t worry. I think she’s okay.”

  “So you think this Elena’s just lying about her?”

  “Not lying, necessarily—but not telling the whole story.”

  “Sure you aren’t just thinking with your dick again?”

  “And what’s wrong with that? It’s my divining rod.”

  Tigger snorted and turned to one of her computer screens. “More like a compass needle.”

  “Pointing dewy south.”

  She laughed. While I had her in a good mood, I started asking her what she knew about some of the other people and names I’d come across. “You ever hear of a girl named Michael Cassidy?”

  “Hear of her?” Tigger said. “I saw her last night.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Michael Cassidy: red hair, green eyes, famous daddy, fourteen minutes into her allotted fifteen? That Michael Cassidy?” I nodded. “She was at that premiere afterparty where Craig Wales overdosed.”

  “You were there?”

  “I set up the lights, favor for a friend. Left before the big foofaraw went down, but I’ve been checking it out this morning on the web.”

  She rode her swivel chair like a magic carpet over to her desk and the bank of computer monitors. There were three. They shared the same screensaver, an elaborate Lionel Train set-up with tracks that extended across all three monitors. When the engine passed from one to the next, it entered a mountain range and disappeared, a suspenseful moment as it traversed the empty gap between screens, only to appear finally on the next one over, chugging renewed puffs of greasy smoke. Tigger rattled the mouse and the little world of perfection vanished from the monitors.

  Tigger’s computer was already logged onto the Internet, constantly online. It was freakish, but in this regard Tigger was no longer the freak. Not that I’d ever dream of saying something like that to her face.

  “There, look.” She pointed at the center monitor.

  A site containing a transcript of the late Craig Wales’ text-message blog accompanied by cell phone snapshots of the party that people had uploaded. In the background of one shot I could see Michael Cassidy arguing with a short woman with a deep tan and peroxide blonde hair.

  “That’s Coy d’Loy,” Tigger said.

  “Coy d’Loy? Sounds French.”

  “If by ‘French’ you mean made-up. She’s one of a current crop of It girls.”

  “What, you mean It, like popular young women of the moment, or IT, like Pennywise the clown?”

  Tigger laughed. “Bit of both. She runs this rabid public relations firm called The Peer Group. Almost went under a few months ago—she was one of those who got taken in by that crooked money manager, Addison—but sh
e took money from a silent partner to stay afloat, some bruiser with ties to the Russian mob.”

  I was only half-listening. Another face in the background had gotten my attention, at first only because he looked so out of place. The crowd was mostly composed of people in their twenties, but this man was in his late sixties, a stubby old man with bulbous features and no chin, black hornrim glasses, and a stiff gray pompadour. I’d seen him someplace else and it bugged me I couldn’t remember where.

  That image was the last picture of the night taken by Craig Wales, followed by his final live-blog entry, a message that he was going off with “MC.” “OMG, used to spank to her TTS. ML!”

  Guess ML stood for “more later” but that was the last he ever note. Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

  “They went off to shoot up together,” Tigger said, “but he didn’t come back from it. Stuff was too pure or else it was doctored with something.”

  A hot bag. Elena’s words echoed in my head. “Where did you hear that?”

  She clicked over to a site called D-O-A.com. It linked to a leaked preliminary M.E. report on the death of Craig Wales. She printed it out for me. Then we skimmed a stream of blogs commenting on the actor’s death, from Perez Hilton and Page Six to Smoking Gun and Hooded Armadillo, but no one had picked up yet on Michael Cassidy in that photo.

  It was exhilarating, knowing that little bit more than was being reported. It’s why I never trusted what I saw or read in the news. Not that what was reported was wrong, just nearly always only a sliver of the truth.

  Now for part two of my little quest. I handed Tigger the iPod.

  “Can you take a look?” I said. “Supposedly Owl used it as a portable hard drive, sucking down info off Sayre’s computer.”

  “And you want to look at it,” Tigger said, “because nothing says love like spying on a lady’s files.”

  “I want to look at it because what’s on it might help explain how Owl wound up dead.”