“There are so many people who had motive to kill the bastard,” she said into the telephone.
On the other side of me, the balcony doors of the west apartment opened, and Maggie, the woman with masses of frizzy brown hair came out to water her flower boxes while talking into her telephone. She was wearing pale orange pedal pushers and a pink half T-shirt.
“Too many people had motive to kill him,” the Irish woman said into her phone.
“Maggie, did you kill him?” the blowsy blond woman asked, and laughed. “You had such good revenge plans for him last week.”
“I’d never kill anyone who owes me money, Lucia,” the frizzy-haired Maggie said into her telephone. “I have an alibi. And now I don’t have to get revenge.”
I was caught in a crossfire. The two women were talking on the phone to each other on either side of me, but looking out into the street, not at each other.
Maggie went on. “A lot of people may have wanted him dead.”
“Oh, Carlos is awake,” blowsy Lucia said, going back into her apartment with the phone.
“Call me later,” Maggie said, hanging up.
She looked over at me.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.”
“You found the body, did you?”
“The body kinda found me …”
“I’m Maggie Mason,” she said. “Who are you?”
“A friend of Tamayo’s, Robin—”
Before I could finish introducing myself, her phone rang in her hand and she said, “Excuse me,” and answered it. “Hello? Oh, hi. Can’t. Busy that night. I have an art action. What? I can’t tell you that.”
Maggie Mason. That sound familiar.
“Roger’s the dealer who handles Blair’s work? Yes, I’ve met him and I didn’t like him. Something about him just sends a rat running up my trouser leg,” Maggie said into the phone.
Involuntarily, I jerked upright. My ex-boyfriend Mad Mike O’Reilly used to say that “it sent a rat running up my trouser leg.”
“I’ve got to find some money. Have you ever had a day when you had to choose between food and cigarettes? Yeah? Well, have you ever had a day when you had to choose between cigarettes and Tampax? Ah, I’m not going to worry yet. I’ve been on the bones of me bum before,” Maggie said. “What? No, the police know I didn’t kill Gerald. I have an alibi, thank God. You know Grace Rouse would love to hang it on me.”
Rats running up trouser legs, bum bones … I suddenly knew where I’d heard of Maggie Mason, aka Mary Margaret Mason, the “scourge of Kilmerry, the only dry county in all of Ireland,” as my ex-boyfriend Mike put it. Don’t bother looking Kilmerry up on a map. You can’t find it. That was one of Mike’s whimsical nicknames. It was a tiny county, naturally, in Ulster, populated by an ascetic Protestant sect, industrious like Mormons. Maggie was the local angry rebel bent on corrupting every male in her village before she left at age seventeen for Belfast. There she met Mike, who was shooting a story for ANN foreign correspondent Reb Ryan. Mike is a cameraman.
Mike was married at the time, but that didn’t stop either him or Maggie from dating. They dated off and on for years before they finally split up, after his marriage ended and before he took up with me. He had told a lot of stories about her over the years, not all of them very flattering.
Maggie, according to Mad Michael O’Reilly, was a wild woman of extreme passions with a legendary bad temper, especially when it came to the men in her life and the other women in her men’s lives. Mike and I had been nonmonogamous, EXCEPT while we were both in New York, so it wouldn’t have been kosher for him to be carrying on with Margaret at the Chelsea Hotel and me in the East Village. Possible, even likely, come to think of it, but not kosher.
After what I’d heard about Maggie, she’d be a lot more upset about it than I would though. As I recall, when she caught Mike with another woman, she threw the woman’s clothes out of the window, sprayed her and Mike with red paint, and broke a lot of glassware. She and Mike were “off” at the time, so she wasn’t in a position to be jealous. Come to think of it, wasn’t Maggie Mason the woman who forwarded an ex-lover’s mail to NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association? Granted, that was years ago, but you get my point. She was a vindictive woman, and not in a fun way.
What sick-humored twist of fate had brought me here, right next door to Maggie Mason? But of course, there was a logical explanation. Tamayo had found this place at the Chelsea Hotel through a friend of Mike’s, though she’d declined to name that friend, who had to be Maggie Mason.
Maybe she did have an alibi in the Gerald Woznik death, but even if she did, she was someone to avoid, clearly. While Maggie was distracted on the phone, I went back inside.
The maid was still scrubbing. Watching her scrub a dead man’s bloodstains wasn’t very appealing either, so I went out to get newspapers and check out the neighborhood. Just in case my mug and my name were in the morning papers, I put on sunglasses and a scarf so I wouldn’t be recognized. Funny, when I was a young reporter I couldn’t wait to become famous. But unfortunately, most of the recognition I got as a reporter had come mainly because of homicide, and fame brought unwanted attention for a while from a fervent coterie of hard-core masochists, all of whom had since moved on to worship more powerful women. In fact, some of my masochistic former fans were more famous than me now. Remember a story a year or so ago about a man arrested in England for stalking Margaret Thatcher? He had her face tattooed over his heart. He was my fan for a while, though I never inspired him to a tattoo. And that guy who pulled out his toenails and sent them to the perky blond cohost of a popular entertainment TV show? That guy is Elroy Vern, who stalked and kidnapped me several years ago, begging me to beat him. He’s in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital now for murder and attempted murder; his correspondence is being more closely monitored.
Down at the front desk, the dark-haired, well-tailored tourist lady I’d seen before was asking questions while another of her flock stood nearby. There were still cops about and I saw one of the detectives from the night before coming out of the office of the manager, Stanley Bard.
“There could be a murderer running around this place,” the tourist lady said, alarmed.
“Madam, we’ll do our utmost to ensure your security,” said the desk clerk. “These things happen everywhere, but they rarely happen here.”
The woman turned in a huff, pushing past me. Her friend followed. “A man shot in our hotel, the horrible insane man outside the convention center, and those frightening teenagers fighting in Times Square last night? I don’t know if I can make it through a week of this,” she said. “On the news this morning, they said there was a slasher on the subway, on the E train, the same subway we took two days ago.”
I thought, How easy it is to tune into the things that confirm our prejudices, and tune out those things that challenge them. New York City was safer than most big cities these days. The odds of being killed by a stranger were way down; the odds of being killed by someone who was supposed to love you, however, were way up. Statistically, she was more likely to be harmed by the women she was keeping company with than by a subway slasher or a homicidal maniac.
The city was cleaner than it used to be too, but this woman, who no doubt came from a gentle, sweet-smelling place where people only die from natural causes and gun-cleaning accidents, saw just the slashers and the murderers, the lack of small amenities. I felt bad for her, that she’d seen the dead guy on the floor. Probably, she’d never seen a murder victim before, and it can be quite a shock the first time, even if you’ve seen it a thousand times on TV shows or on the news. I felt bad in a more general way too, that she wasn’t enjoying New York, a city I came to as a tourist and fell deeply in love with.
It seemed a shame that she couldn’t see everything that this city, or even just this particular street, had to offer. Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues is one of the city’s more eclectic blocks and I walked slowly
down it, trying to chill out, looking in the windows of the stores. There were two hotels—the Chelsea and the Chelsea Savoy—a YMCA, a library, a fishing-tackle store, a synagogue, a secondhand guitar store, a comic-book store, S&M cafe, two banks, a Radio Shack, three hairdressers, three holistic healers, a record store, a tax attorney, an art-supply store, a health-food store, two delis, two boutiques, an optometrist, a dentist, a stationery store, a movieplex, two subway stations, the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), plus its bookstore. There was a place called The 99 Cent Palace (“A Kingdom for Under a Buck”), where cheap sundry items were sold—brands of cereal and cleaning products I’d never heard of, Mexican toothpaste, cheap plastic bowls.
There were eight or nine eating places, two of them in the Chelsea Hotel, and two doughnut places, a Krispy Kreme and a place on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-Third known simply as “Donuts,” which had two horseshoe-shaped lunch counters and looked like something right out of an old Life magazine, as if it hadn’t changed since 1945, except for the ten different flavors of Snapple in the cooler. I went inside Donuts. It was a funny little place. Its motto was proudly emblazoned on the menu signs on the wall: “Open 24 Hours. We stay open to serve you when you need us, not when we need you.”
There was just one other customer in the place, a white guy with a gray ponytail, wearing a red flannel shirt and some sort of New Age rainbow medallion around his neck. I imagined he fancied himself some kind of cross between Hemingway and Timothy Leary. An old waiter in a big white apron approached me timidly and said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “What can I get for you?”
“A chocolate chunk muffin,” I said. “And coffee, light, please.”
He mumbled something and backed away from me.
The murder had happened late, and only one paper, the News-Journal, had the story in time to make its deadline. To my great relief, the News-Journal reported the body had fallen on “an unidentified tenant.” Thank you, June Fairchild, I thought. She’d kept my name out of it … for the moment.
“Who Shot Controversial Art Dealer?” The News-Journal asked. “Troubled art dealer Gerald Woznik was found dead in the notorious Chelsea Hotel last night. Police say he’d been shot in the back.”
It went on to say that in recent months, Woznik reportedly had had financial and personal troubles, and quoted Woznik’s ex-wife, Naomi Wise Woznik, who issued a brief statement from the surrealist commune in Tuscany where she was living: “The world has lost a great art connoisseur and a real bastard.”
That word, “bastard,” came up a lot in quotes from “friends,” fellow art dealers, and artists who claimed the dead had ripped them off. Gerald Woznik was also “arrogant,” “manipulative,” and “a liar and a thief.”
Only heiress and art dealer Grace Rouse, the woman Woznik had been living with, defended him.
“He was a misunderstood genius,” she said.
My cell phone rang, startling the timid waiter and drawing looks from the short-order cook and the guy who looked like Timothy Leary. I felt like a traveler from the future, whipping out the phone in this anachronistic joint.
“Robin, it’s June Fairchild,” said the caller. “I wanted you to know, one of your neighbors at the Chelsea had been watching through the peephole, and saw the man slam, bleeding, against the door, before you opened it.”
“Great, so I’m completely in the clear then.”
“You haven’t been cleared officially, but I wouldn’t worry. Richard Bigger won’t officially clear you until they’ve arrested someone else. You know how he hates you, Robin.”
“Who was this neighbor? Was it the bodybuilder?” I asked, and described him. “He seems to spend a lot of time in the hallway.”
“He told us he didn’t know anything. The neighbor who saw you was a man named Cleves, a tourist from San Diego. Didn’t see the actual crime, didn’t see anything else and was flying back west today. Robin, I’m beginning to believe you really do have a curse on your head,” she said, with her tony, uptown, Dalton School accent. June Fairchild of the NYPD was once known as “The Debutante Detective” because of her flawless social pedigree. I knew her from a previous unfortunate incident.
“What about the frizzy-haired brunette, Maggie Mason?”
“The police weren’t able to interview her until this morning, but, she apparently has an alibi. She was on AOL in a comic-book chat at the time of the murder. I’ll try to keep you informed, as much as I can, Robin, but I’m taking a few days off to look after my daughter. She’s having her tonsils pulled. I have to go, Robin. I’ll talk to you later.”
What a serene vacation it had been so far, I thought—an apartment building burns down and a dead man falls into my face. I was having dinner with Phil, from my old building, that evening. Phil’s philosophy was not to complain about bad things that happen, they might just prevent something worse. I’d have to ask him what horrible event could possibly be prevented by these disasters to make them somehow justifiable in the cosmic scheme of things. It would have to be a pretty bad event, like a sarin gas attack on the subway or a Pat Buchanan presidency.
chapter five
“The fire, it’s a shame, luv, but who knows? If it hadn’t happened, a week from now a gas pipe might have ruptured, blown up the building, and killed us all,” said Phil, lifting his big Thai beer in a salute to our good luck. We were sitting at a corner table at Regional Thai Taste, a restaurant on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street.
“Except you. Somehow, you’d survive,” I said.
Phil has survived an extraordinary number of disasters in his lifetime. This all began during World War Two, when Phil was a young British soldier in North Africa and the only survivor of an attack by Rommel. Since then, he’d pulled widows and babies out of fires, crawled out of the wreckage of plane crashes and ferry sinkings, and eluded a cobra that came up a Calcutta toilet. The stories he told about these things were really unbelievable—I thought he was completely full of crap until he showed me his scrapbook of news clippings about his various adventures. He didn’t show it to me to be boastful, although he had a healthy ego and was not a falsely modest saint kind of guy. He showed it to me to prove he wasn’t full of crap and to get me to buy into his wacky philosophical tricks.
Tricks like: When something inconvenient happens to you, something beyond your control, you have to try to look at it as maybe preventing something worse. This kind of washes out when facing famine, war, or epidemic disease, but it can really help with day-to-day coping. In my life, there seems to be no completely reliable law but Murphy’s—whatever can go wrong will—and the idea that what goes wrong might in fact prevent something far more terrible is more reassuring than that old morose “things could be worse” digestive.
The first time Phil told me this little trick, he had just fixed my front door, which had jammed, locking me inside and making me late for a very important business meeting. “Robin, if you’d been able to get out sooner, you might have wandered into the path of a car or a killer,” he said at the time.
“You think this murder prevented something worse from happening, Phil?” I now asked. Phil chewed on his pad thai and washed it down with more beer before saying, “What’s the quote you like from Twelfth Night?”
“‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.’”
“You never know what might have been averted. Everything in the universe is connected. Drink some of the beer and let’s talk about something else. You haven’t told me yet how your trip was.”
I took a swig and said, “It didn’t go that well. It’s hard traveling from country to country. Every country has new rules you have to memorize and follow or risk offending people. I don’t know how you do it, Phil, with all the traveling you’ve done. On this patch of land, you can’t eat pork. Jump over to this patch, you can’t eat beef. Move sideways a half step and you’re among people who don’t eat any meat, who wear special shoes on their feet and screen
s over their mouths so they don’t accidentally step on or swallow an insect. It’s confusing.”
“Did you offend some people?”
“To put it mildly. Among other things, I brought a curse upon the heads of the five children of the Thai TV president, or some damn thing. I liked those kids too, Phil, we took to each other. Now, they all think they’re cursed and I’m the big red-headed bogeyman who did it to them.”
“Every place has its own traditions, superstitions, etiquette.…”
“How do you manage to travel to all those refugee camps in all those places and not offend people without meaning to?” Phil spent part of each year volunteering in refugee camps.
“I do offend people. That can’t be prevented. When I do, I apologize sincerely, explain my ignorance, and ask where that honorable tradition I’ve offended came from. That way I learn, and they see that I have no harmful intent.”
Phil was so smart. That was much better than bursting out laughing and saying, “You’re kidding me,” for example.
“But sometimes people don’t even know how something got started,” I said. “They do it because it’s always been done that way, and everybody else is doing it too. And sometimes they don’t tell you that you’ve offended them. They’re too polite. You continue having what you think is a lovely time with them, and think all went well, until you get back to the office and there’s an angry fax about your rudeness and lack of respect.”
“Not everyone takes offense so easily. Don’t worry about the ones who do. They’re a minority.” He took another swallow and said, “I have more bad news, I’m afraid. The building looks bad, luv, six apartments completely destroyed, including yours. There’s smoke damage, water damage. But you’ve seen it, I suppose.”
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 5