As a courtesy, because Nadia was a friend of Tamayo’s, I knocked on the door instead of using my key. The door opened with the chain on.
“Oh, it’s you,” Nadia said.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
She slipped the chain off, quickly, pulled me in, and shut the door.
“I thought it was my fiancé,” she said.
“Manboy’s not here yet?”
“Manboy? No, he’s not here yet.”
“He got on the elevator more than fifteen minutes ago.”
“He didn’t arrive,” she said. “Oh my Godt.”
“Maybe he got lost. Does he know this was the right apartment after all?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. Oh my Godt.”
“Don’t push the panic button,” I said. “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. You know, a chance to think about things before you rush into something.”
“You don’t understand. We must get married.”
“Why? You’re not pregnant, right? You said you haven’t had sex yet …”
“Swear you won’t tell anyone this,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“My people come from a country where marriages are arranged. My parents wanted me to marry someone I do not love. So I had to run away.”
“Oh. Okay, but why do you also have to get married to another man? Marriage is a big step …”
“Why? Don’t be an idiot. Because I’m in love,” she said.
“Where are your people from?” I asked her.
“Plotzonia,” she said.
“Plotzonia?”
“That’s what I call it,” she said.
“What’s it really called?”
“It’s better if you don’t know,” she said.
I pressed her, but she wouldn’t tell me the real name of the place. She said her family had moved back there from America a year or so before. It was apparently a pretty backward place with arranged marriages, lots of hostage-taking, no decent malls, bagels, or discos, and the whole country smelled as if dirty socks were burning all the time. Her parents were very controlling, and while in Plotzonia she spent most of her time in her room watching satellite TV with her cousins and chatting on the Internet. She’d met Tamayo on the Net.
Then, six months earlier, while on a shopping trip to New York with her “family chaperone,” she’d ditched the chaperone and come to stay here at the Chelsea with Tamayo for a week. It was after that escapade, she said, that her family decided to marry her off sooner rather than later.
“You understand now?” she said.
“I understand the part about choosing your own life. Getting married, though … You seem awfully young to be getting married, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I do mind. What difference does age make, when you’ve met your soul mate?” she said.
“Oh yeah, soul mates. I’ve had a couple dozen of those.”
“If you knew him as I do …,” she said, and went into a paean to her man.
You’d think this guy was God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost rolled up with Leonardo DiCaprio and Alan Greenspan from the way she talked, the way her eyelashes fluttered, her face glowed, and her breath kept catching in her throat. Clearly, this girl was in the grip of The Madness, that biologically induced hallucination designed to make young people mate, breed, and buy a lot of consumer goods to salve the misery of an early marriage. It was probably no good pointing this out to her. People in the grip of that madness can’t see reason.
“He’s The One,” she said, in summation, sitting down at the kitchen table.
“Does he have a job? How will you live? Where will you live?”
“Why do you need to know so much?” she snapped, and grew suspicious again.
“I don’t. Whatever. It’s your life. Blessings, et cetera. I’m going to take a shower now and then crash if you don’t mind.”
While I was showering, the phone rang. Nadia must have jumped on it because it only rang once. She hollered something, but I couldn’t make it out over the sound of the water. The next thing I heard was the door slamming, and when I came out, she was gone.
A book she’d been reading, Man Trap, was on the table. I took it to bed with me, figuring it would either be good for a few laughs or put me to sleep. It was frankly hard to resist the testimonials on the back from women who had almost lost hope, then found the men of their dreams thanks to the Man Trap Way. It wasn’t Nadia’s book. According to the note inside, it had been loaned to her by someone named Maggie M., who wrote, “When your man is starting to drift away, use this book to bring him back.”
Louise Bryant jumped up and parked her carcass next to mine on the loft bed as I opened Man Trap. A matchbook Nadia had used as a bookmark fell out. Thinking it might provide a clue about where she was from, I picked it up and looked at it. But it was local, from a place called Bus Stop Bar & Grill, and it showed a black silhouette of a building on a red background. The match-book was either really outdated or really retro and cool. I couldn’t decide.
Inside, in Tamayo’s handwriting, were the words, “Say hey to Stinky for me. T.” I had to laugh. It was just like Tamayo to know a guy named Stinky.
Man Trap was a very Machiavellian program of tyranny tempered with indulgence, with chapter headings like “Choosing Your Prey,” “The Right Bait,” “Setting the Man Trap,” “It’s Kind to Be Cruel,” “Pulling the Strings,” “When to Use Tears” (and other weapons God gave us), and “Playing Hard to Get.” This book was the latest in a whole industry of books telling women how to plot against men to get commitment without sex, and books telling men how to plot against women to get sex without commitment.
Two pages into chapter two, as I was learning how to feign a combination of simmering sexuality, sexual innocence, and moral superiority (because men are supposed to find this irresistible), my eyelids grew heavy. I was almost asleep when I thought I heard the front door slam.
“Hello?” I called out.
There was no answer.
“Hello?” I said again, then got up, grabbed my rifle, and went to the door. I couldn’t see through the peephole and figured some jokester had his or her finger over it. Very quietly, I slipped the chain off, planning to open the door really fast so whoever it was would lose their balance and stumble into the apartment.
But when I jerked the door open, a body fell forward onto me, landing on me with such force that I almost lost my footing and fell flat on my ass. I was face-to-face with Gerald, the man who kind of looked like Gregory Peck. I pushed him off me, and he fell backward, onto the hallway floor.
He was bleeding. He opened his mouth and said something that sounded like, “Bye,” and then he died.
chapter four
“You have a curse on your head?” NYPD detective Barry Burns asked me, not making any effort to suppress his skeptical smirk.
Burns, a portly black man with a very wrinkled forehead, had asked what my connection was to the dead guy, and I’d had to explain that I had no known connection beyond some curse that had me stumbling over murder victims about once a year, though this was a new one—it had stumbled on me this time, and while I was inconveniently holding a firearm. He then wanted to know about the previous victims, making a lot of notes and looking at me with narrowed eyes of suspicion while I told him. You can’t blame him, really.
Burns turned to a uniformed cop and said, “Get me the arrest record on this woman, PLEASE.”
I was sitting at the Formica kitchen table in bloody clothes staring out into the hallway. A cop was drawing an outline around the body, which was still on the floor, the feet in Tamayo’s apartment, the rest of the body outside the door in the hallway. Another cop was trying to keep the neighbors away from it. A couple of the pastel-suited Mary Sue women came out of their room, skirting around the neighbors and the cops.
Pushing past them came the man who worked the front desk at night.
“Mr. Bard is going to hate to h
ear this!” he said, referring to the eccentric businessman and art lover who runs the hotel. “We haven’t had a speck of trouble in years. We haven’t had a murder here in two decades.”
Another detective arrived, pushing his way through the spectators and stepping carefully over the corpse.
“You must be the good cop,” I said to him hopefully.
But I was wrong. Instead of getting your standard good cop-bad cop team, I got bad cop-worse cop, though they were both observing the city’s new politeness guidelines for police, adding please and thank you every now and then. Maybe I was being too sensitive, but there seemed to be some sarcasm in their pleases and thank-yous.
Burns gave the second detective, Corcoran, a synopsis of my explanation, and went to consult with a cop out in the hallway.
“A curse, huh?” said Corcoran. “Do you hear voices? Please, tell me, did a voice tell you to kill this guy?”
“I didn’t kill him and I don’t hear voices. I just have bad luck.”
“This guy break your heart or something?”
“I don’t even know this guy. I met him for five minutes in the elevator today. That’s it.”
“PLEASE tell me, why did you open the door then? You open your door to strangers as a rule?” Corcoran asked. He pulled a piece of nicotine gum out of his pocket, peeled off the foiled backing, and put it in his mouth.
“I thought it might be the other houseguest, or her boyfriend …”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.” I looked around and realized Nadia’s stuff was gone. “I guess they hooked up and went off to elope.”
“What is her name?”
“Nadia something.”
“She was staying here, but you don’t know her name?”
“Nadia didn’t tell me her last name. I don’t know anything about her except she came to New York to elope with her boyfriend and she’s from a country with no Benettons and no bagels,” I said. “I don’t live here, I’m a guest of the woman who rents this apartment. She’s traveling around the world. You see, my apartment burned down …”
“Yeah? How did that happen?” Corcoran asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t cause the fire,” I said.
“And you didn’t kill anyone.”
“Exactly!”
“What about the gun you had? Please, tell me about it,” said Corcoran.
“Forensics will find it hasn’t been fired. I don’t even have bullets for it. I just keep it around because it’s scary looking and has sentimental value,” I said. “You won’t find the gun that killed him around here.”
“Did an accomplice take it away?”
“Look, I don’t even know the dead guy. If I killed him, would I have signed that consent form to let you search the place? If you don’t believe me, call June Fairchild in the NYPD public affairs department, she’ll vouch for me. I’ve helped solve a few homicides.”
There’s nothing a hardened New York cop likes more than amateur crime fighter such as me. My situation wouldn’t be helped once the head of homicide, Richard Bigger, got wind of this. Bigger thought I was a very clever serial killer who had somehow committed all these murders myself and had constructed elaborate frame-ups to conceal my crimes.
Around us, two cops wearing surgical gloves were dusting for prints, picking up bits of lint and things with tweezers and putting them into little plastic evidence bags. Another took photographs of the scene from the hallway.
“You see anyone in the hallway when you found the body?” Corcoran asked.
“No. But I wasn’t looking. I did see the dead guy arguing with a woman with frizzy brown hair and an Irish accent earlier,” I said. “I think her name is Maggie.”
One of the other cops said, “From the way blood dripped in the hallway, it looks like he was shot down the hallway, about ten feet away, then he staggered to the door, and died.”
“See?” I said. “It was a random act that he picked this door.”
One of the uniformed cops came over and said to Corcoran, “The victim’s name is Gerald Woznik. He’s an art dealer. Apparently a real bastard and a gopher with a lot of enemies.”
“A gopher?” I repeated.
“In one hole and out another,” said Corcoran. “See what you can find out about a woman in her thirties or forties with frizzy brown hair and an Irish accent, possibly named Maggie.”
Probably, I should have called my lawyer, Spencer Roo, before speaking to the cops, but in the excitement, and my exhaustion, I figured it was better just to tell the truth. Besides, Roo was a major publicity hound, and I hoped to keep my name out of the papers if possible.
It took another hour of exhausting back-and-forth before I was vouched for by June Fairchild, though Burns and Corcoran were not quite sold. They weren’t taking me downtown to book me, but they were still suspicious, what with the gun and the dead man’s blood on me. They didn’t let me go until one of the uniforms came in and told them that some other woman was seen climbing down one of the side fire escapes around the time the dead man was shot and killed. Only then did they let me change out of my bloody clothes, shower, and collapse on the loft bed, which had been scoured for fiber and DNA evidence.
Naturally, I felt bad, in a generic way, for this dead art dealer, Gerald Woznik, because he had lived and loved and died too soon; nobody should have to meet a violent end in a bright, white, perfect world, and every man’s death diminishes me because the bell tolls for me, etc. I knew from previous homicides that his face in that last moment would haunt my nightmares for years to come, sometimes in sick ways that would make Freud blush so hard he’d lose the circulation in his legs. But it was a relief, in a way, to learn that the victim was a “bastard” with enemies, because that indicated the killer was someone out to get him, and him alone, and was not, hopefully, a serial killer on the loose.
The cops would be there all night, looking for tiny bits of evidence, measuring things, taking pictures, and the last of them, Burns, was just leaving when I woke up late the next morning. They had taken my rifle with them. The body was gone, but the chalk outline and a splattering of blood remained on Tamayo’s floor.
“Did you get a suspect?” I asked.
“We’re investigating,” he said. “But you’ll be glad to hear we’re not sealing the crime scene, and the hotel is sending a maid up to wash the floor.”
“I’m in the clear, right?”
“We haven’t officially cleared you yet,” he said, but he was no longer looking at me as if I was a killer.
In all the commotion, I’d somehow lost track of my cat, who was nowhere to be seen after the cops left. After I called down to the front desk to ask them to keep an eye peeled for an old gray cat with a glow-in-the-dark collar, I took a walk down the hallway to see if I could find her. Louise always roamed pretty freely when we lived in the East Village, and always found her way home, but this wasn’t our home, and I was worried she might wander all the way back to our burned-out building. She was nowhere to be seen on the seventh floor. I asked the tattooed bodybuilder, who stood in his doorway lifting hand weights, if he’d seen her, but he didn’t answer. He just stared ahead, stone-faced.
When I got back to Tamayo’s apartment, Louise was scratching at the balcony doors.
“How did you get out there?” I asked as she ran inside to the kitchen, howling for breakfast. After I started the coffee maker, I made Louise the special meal she likes—prescription cat food sautéed with bok choy and low-salt, low-fat oyster sauce, then let the poor maid in to clean up the blood.
“You must have drawn the short straw,” I said to her.
“I don’t understand,” she said to me.
“To get the job of cleaning a crime scene.”
“Oh, I got the job because I’ve cleaned bloodstains before,” she said and told me she used to work at a fancy-schmancy four-star hotel uptown that was a popular spot for socialite suicides, “people who check in to check out,” she said, in
a soft voice and with the sad acceptance that comes from seeing into people’s bedrooms for three decades.
“You might want to open the windows. I’m going to apply the bleach solution and the fumes can be powerful,” she said.
I took her advice, poured myself a big European-size cup of coffee, and went out on the balcony with Louise. Ever since the homicide, the giant fingers had been squeezing my chest again. Homicide used to energize me, fill me with a sense that the guilty must be found and justice must be served. But I was getting older, and crime-fighting is a young girl’s game. Relax, relax, relax, I told myself as I sat down in a molded white chair outside. You’re on vacation. The cops are on the job. You don’t have to get any more involved in this than the average good citizen doing their duty. Let it go, let it go, let it go.
A light breeze blew. The smell of hot fat and sugar wafted down the street from Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I closed my eyes and tried to block thoughts of the murder with a daydream about the day I met Pierre, the French genius, while I was in Paris for a Women in Media conference. When Tamayo heard I was going to Paris, she insisted I call him. Tamayo knows some pretty interesting people, so I did, arranging to meet him at his favorite cafe on rue Jacob.
Pierre was there when I arrived, reading a magazine called the Journal of Recreational Mathematics. I recognized him from a photograph of Tamayo’s. He hadn’t seen me.
I sat down at the next table, leaned over, and said, “That’s a much more fun magazine since Tina Brown took it over.”
He smiled. Later I learned he didn’t get the joke. Though he read and wrote English perfectly, he didn’t speak it very well.
I closed my eyes, did some deep breathing. A guitar wailed somewhere, a siren somewhere else. The wind changed, and the smell of hot sugar was blown away by the smell of hot soap and bleach in a bracing blast of air from the hotel laundry. At my feet, Louise was asleep and purring in a sliver of sunlight.
The balcony doors to the east of me opened, and the Hispanic woman I’d seen throwing shoes down the hallway came out, dragging a phone with her. She was dressed in a transparent blue-and-pink flowered dress, the buttons of the bodice undone to reveal the top of a white slip. She was smoking a Gauloise, exhaling twists of dark, tarry smoke into the air, looking very blowsy and louche, as if she had stepped right out of a Tennessee Williams play, or off the cover of one of those sex-and-crime pulp paperbacks of the 1940s and ’50s.
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 4