“Did she have her monkey with her?” Miriam asked.
“Yes, but I understand he was sent to live with her grandmother in Osaka before she left Japan,” I said. “About Nadia—”
“Which grandmother?”
“Her grandma Rei. Her grandma Ruth lives on Long Island.”
“And what is her monkey’s name? I’ve forgotten,” Miriam said.
I got the feeling she was quizzing me to make sure I really was a friend of Tamayo’s. You couldn’t blame her. When you’re a famous patron of the arts, people probably go to great lengths to get your ear.
“Ernie Kovacs. About Nadia … when was she here?”
“Early evening,” she said. “She had just left when I heard the news about Gerald Woznik. I was absolutely speechless.”
“What time did you hear about the murder?”
“Oh, dear. It was after Carlos was here, after Nadia was here, before dinner with John Wells, around eight P.M.”
“Do you know where Nadia went afterward?”
We were interrupted. Ben came in with a young woman and said, “One of the Living Statues, Mrs. Grundy.”
“Oh, good. Show me what you do, young lady,” Miriam said.
The young woman posed, very still, for what seemed a long time.
“Another pose, please,” Miriam said, and then requested yet another pose before saying, “That’ll do. You’re hired. Ben, I just had an idea. I want one very tall man, the tallest man you can find, and one very tall woman, to just mingle. Oh, oh, and those drag queens who do me in that cabaret act, the Swinging Miriams.”
“Of course, Mrs. Grundy. That’s inspired,” said Ben, still blasé.
After the living statue and Ben left, I asked again, “Do you know where Nadia went after she saw you?”
Before she could answer, Ben came in again, this time with a contortionist, twisted like a pretzel but somehow managing to walk.
“No,” Miriam said, sending the pretzel on his way. “I don’t think so.”
“We’re having a party later this week,” she explained to me. “And we’re still putting the entertainment together.”
“It sounds like some party.”
“Oliver’s birthday party,” she said. “It’s always an event.”
“For your late husband?”
“Well, for his ghost,” she said. “And the other ghosts of the Chelsea, and our living friends. You were asking about Nadia?”
“Do you know where Nadia is from?”
“Oh, she had a funny name for it. Plotzonia.” She studied me for a moment, and said, “I hope I’m not violating a trust by telling you this. She was eloping, I believe.”
“I know,” I said. “But she didn’t meet up with her young man.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Where was she going to elope?”
“I don’t know where she was going to elope. You might ask Maggie Mason. I believe she’s involved. I must excuse myself, I have—”
“Do you have any idea who might have killed Gerald Woznik?”
“My dear, who knows what sets people off?” she said. “He was a ladies’ man, he was a less than scrupulous businessman. But in cases like these, I tend to think passion is a more likely motive than money.”
As Ben escorted me out, I asked him about Old Frank, the guy who peed on the wall and cursed out Miriam’s dinner guests the night before.
“Frank Gozzomi, the surrealist painter. You’ve probably seen him. He often sleeps in the red armchair in the lobby.”
“He had some history with Mrs. Grundy?”
“He’s in love with her. He met her here in the Chelsea, just after her family fled Europe.”
“She left him for Oliver Grundy.”
“Yes.”
“And Old Frank has just hung around being jealous all that time?”
“No. He moved to Italy and lived there until ten or so years ago, when he moved back to the Chelsea. He’s essentially harmless, but very annoying. I do wish he wouldn’t urinate on the walls, especially without using his hands.”
“You mean …”
“He must be taking Viagra. The man is eighty-nine years old,” Ben said.
As far as Nadia info went, my visit with Mrs. Grundy was fruitless, though it was a genuine kick in the ass to meet her. What a dame, I thought as I walked down the wrought-iron circular staircase that runs through the middle of the Chelsea. Miriam was the kind of old lady I wanted to become—rich, mischievous, an eccentric role model for future drag queens.
But Maggie Mason remained my best lead. This gave me a sharp pain. Maybe she was over the whole Mike O’Reilly thing, I reasoned, though Mike had said she held a grudge for a long, long time. Didn’t he say for over ten years she sent a velvet heart with a wooden stake in it to her first lover every Valentine’s Day?
As long as I remained very circumspect, didn’t spill any giveaway information, maybe she wouldn’t know about my tempestuous relationship with Mad Mike.
Nadia and Rocky … that gave me knots too. Crazy kids. There was no way to feel good about this one. If Nadia got nabbed by the feds and was sent back to her homeland, she’d be forced into a marriage to a man she didn’t love in a country she utterly despised. If she and her equally belligerent beau Rocky got together and eloped, they’d hate each other in two years and be in divorce court in three, unless they found some applied-physics way to turn two negatives into a positive and stay together bonded by mutual loathing and seething resentment. But that was a far better scenario than the worst-case one—that something had happened to her because she witnessed the murder of Gerald Woznik.
Here was where Phil’s little equation went wonky, because the only thing that could clearly prevent the first two scenarios was the last.
I did know this much: Nadia didn’t kill Gerald Woznik, because she was with Miriam Grundy at the time of death, unless Miriam was lying, and why would she lie? Lucia had an alibi too. According to the cops, Maggie Mason, who had threatened Woznik right in front of me in the elevator, had an alibi too.
As I was coming up the seventh-floor landing, Maggie Mason scurried past.
“Maggie!” I called after her. “May I speak with you?”
Quickly, she turned and said, “What?”
“I’m Robin, I’m staying at Tamayo’s.”
“I remember …”
“Did you meet Nadia? I know that Tamayo told her to call you if she needed any help, and I saw that she had a book of yours.”
“Yes, Man Trap. Great book. It got me my current boyfriend. Have you read it?” she asked.
“Not really. You talked to Nadia when?”
“The day she arrived. The day of the murder.”
“She called you.”
“Yes, and I went over, we had coffee, chatted for a while, but she hasn’t called me back for any help.”
“That’s because she’s gone. She has disappeared,” I said. “I’m worried.…”
“Oh, I think you’re overreacting,” she said. “She was planning to elope, after all.”
“The groom-to-be is at Tamayo’s place now, so they didn’t elope. I don’t think I’m overreacting.”
“The groom is at Tamayo’s? Quel dommage.”
“Yes, and Nadia left Tamayo’s with her things not long before Gerald Woznik was murdered, dying in Tamayo’s doorway. The timing bothers me. Where were you around that time?”
“On AOL, E-mailing my boyfriend and some friends, chatting in a comic-book chat room. Why?”
“I saw you in the elevator arguing with the dead guy, Woznik, before he was killed,” I said.
“The bastard owed me money for some paintings I gave him to sell. He was supposed to bring me some money and he was late, so I was angry,” she said. “The police checked it out. As far as Nadia goes, I just can’t believe Nadia would be connected to the murder.”
“She might have been in the wrong place, wrong time,” I said. “Think. She must have said something that co
uld give us a lead to her.”
“I really can’t think of anything, and I’m late for a meeting. I’m sure Nadia is just hiding out until the heat’s off. I’ll call you as soon as I have a free moment. Sorry.”
Without waiting for me to respond, she disappeared through the swinging door to the east wing of the seventh floor. I followed, but when I got there, she had vanished.
Meanwhile, Rocky had found out exactly SQUAT. He was in the bathroom when I got back to Tamayo’s, and hollered at me through the door. He claimed to have made some calls, but when quizzed couldn’t say whom he had called or where they were. He was useless.
Maggie was the only lead. Nadia had left no clues behind; the only thing she’d left was that stupid book, Man Trap … and the matchbook inside, from the Bus Stop Bar & Grill.
“Rocky,” I said, knocking on the bathroom door.
“Huh? What?” he asked.
“You know those matches I gave you? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I found a lighter. Do you need the lighter?”
“No.”
Tamayo had written something inside that matchbook, something about saying hi to Stinky. That sure sounded like some kind of code.
chapter seven
Bus Stop Bar & Grill was a name that could indicate either understated whimsy or complete lack of imagination, as there was a bus stop right outside the bar. It’s on Bowery, south of Bleecker, a distinctly ungentrified stretch of Manhattan real estate where grass and weeds grow in the cracks of the buckled sidewalks and the air smells of gasoline from nearby taxicab garages and gas stations.
The front of the Bus Stop Bar was tilted slightly, as if the building was sinking on the west side, but it was just the fronting that was affected. Inside, the bar was level. Except for one miserable male loner at the bar, chain-smoking and drinking, and a woman, maybe in her late sixties, flipping through a magazine, the place looked empty. There are few things as depressing as a not-quite-empty bar just after it opens in the late morning, the sunlight coming through the windows in a filtered way that makes the interior of a shady place shadier.
I asked the woman by the jukebox if she could point me to whoever ran the joint. After looking me up and down, she told me that would be her husband, Stinky, and called for him loudly. A few minutes later, an old guy came out of a back room. He was easily seventy, with thinning white hair, a gold tooth, and a big beer belly reined in by the strings of his white apron.
“Irene, get back to work. We could have a rush in an hour,” Stinky said to his wife, who got up, scowled at me, and went behind the bar.
Stinky and I sat down and I told him briefly about my romantic mission to help lovers elope. He snorted and said, in a coarse, deep voice, “Don’t do ’em any favors!”
By now I understood where his nickname came from. He had a powerful body odor with a sharp, individual edge to it, like onions boiled in beer, with just a soupçon of ripe game.
Stinky leaned over the table, bringing his ripe aura closer, raised one eyebrow in a way I imagined he thought was very devilish, and said, “Marriage is the death of love.”
Well, that—and that powerful force field of yours, Stinky, I thought.
“You might be right,” I said. “Oh, Tamayo says hey.”
“Tamayo! She’s a friend of Tamayo’s,” Stinky called out to his wife. “How is Tamayo?”
“She’s traveling around the world with her boyfriend, Buzzer. I’m actually here about another friend of Tamayo’s.”
I pulled out the photo of Nadia and showed it to him.
“Have you seen this girl?”
“She doesn’t look familiar,” he said. “What’s your name again?”
“Robin.”
“Stinky and Robin, that sounds good together,” he said without any hint of irony at all. Maybe I was flattering myself, but it seemed like the bastard was flirting with me.
“You’re sure you haven’t seen this girl in here?”
“Sure I’m sure,” he said. “Are you married?”
“Divorced actually, but …”
“Then you know what it is like. Don’t be in such a hurry to help others make that mistake. You want a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Irene, bring me a boilermaker,” he yelled.
When Irene brought his boilermaker, I asked her about Nadia. She looked at the picture and handed it back with a frown, shooting darts at me with her eyes.
“That’s enough, Irene. Back to work,” Stinky said, slapping her ass.
Irene couldn’t help smiling when he did this. She stood there, blushing, for a moment, until a new customer, a security guard, came in and sat down at the bar, well away from the miserable loner.
Stinky said to me, “Men and women should be coconspirators, doncha think?”
“What do you mean?”
“Coconspirators,” Stinky said. “They should plot together against the government, the churches, the institutions, the husbands, the wives, all of ’em that are trying to keep ’em apart.”
“Well, in a way, my young lovers are doing just that,” I said, trying to get back on the topic.
“What can you tell me about you?” he asked.
In the background, I saw his wife, glaring at me while sharpening a big knife.
“I’m boring, Stinky,” I said.
He did the eyebrow thing again. He had an endearing, lopsided grin, marred now by the gold tooth, and with a little imagination one could see the face of a handsome, cocky young man. It was kind of cute that he didn’t realize he’d lost that old magic. But did this guy really think he could pick me up … right in front of his wife? What balls. Did his wife really think there was any threat at all of this happening? And why was she chopping that corned beef with such fury?
“How come you haven’t been by before? Listen,” he said, his voice lowered to a rough whisper. “Irene goes to see her sister Daisy on Thursdays. Why don’t you come back then?”
“I’m busy on Thursdays, Stinky, but thanks,” I said. “You’ve got a nice wife there. Have you been married long?”
“Twenty years.”
“Kids?”
“I hoped to have children, but Irene, she was in an industrial accident at her old job in a pesticide plant. It made her barren and cost her her sense of smell. But the settlement bought us this bar.”
“You ought to look after her, be nice to her,” I said. “Pretty lady like that. You two are meant for each other.”
He grinned at my chastisement like a naughty boy who just couldn’t help himself, light reflecting off his gold tooth. I hesitated before giving the hound my card, then decided he was harmless and handed it to him with the Chelsea number written on the back.
“Call me if this girl comes in here. And keep this on the QT.”
“Always on the QT. I’m a discreet guy,” he said, with a lewd emphasis on the word “discreet.”
Irene yelled at him to take a call, and Stinky left me with a clammy grope of a handshake.
Well, it had been a long shot. The matchbook was probably put in the book by Maggie Mason before she loaned it to Nadia, and the message inside was not code at all, as there really was a guy named Stinky at the Bus Stop Bar & Grill, a friend of Tamayo’s. (Her affection for people of all kinds was almost as embracing as that of the good, Christian nuns Mrs. Ramirez was staying with. Maybe more so.)
Not sure where to go next, I ambled toward Canal Street and Chinatown. How quiet the city had become. At the moment, I could hear no honking horns, no sirens, no boom boxes, no hollering workmen, no screaming teenagers. The people weren’t talking, to each other or to themselves, they were just walking forward, silently, steadily. It was so quiet you could hear the electricity humming inside office buildings, the wind blowing, the eerie tinkle of wind chimes somewhere. It was spooky, it was Twilight Zone. In my absence, someone had replaced the old city with this impostor. Through all the changes the city had undergone it had heretofore retained that
energy and attitude that propelled eight million dreams and/or nightmares. But both those things were lagging now.
This was what really bugged me about the new New York. It wasn’t just the gentrification of the Lower East Side, or that Times Square had gone from a steamy sleaze pot to the equivalent of Las Vegas’s Glitter Gulch, cold and shiny, or the erosion of small personal freedoms. It was kind of low-energy, low-grade passivity that seemed to be everywhere. People were more polite, but not nearly as friendly. The whole city was becoming circumspect.
Chinatown, with its blaring Taiwanese music and merchants calling out to each other, was a welcome relief. I had to get food for the manboy—it was freakish how much food disappeared into that fuzzy young maw—and I was thinking a healthy stir-fry might be just the ticket. The food he had asked me to get was all crap—beer, Coca-Cola, chocolate, potato chips. What he needed was fruit and vegetables and protein, milk for strong bones, and some canned things he could prepare for himself while I was out finding his girlfriend.
When I got back, my arms were full of bulging bags of groceries—in paper, not plastic. I knocked on the door with my foot, hoping Rocky would answer and help me out. But he didn’t. I had to put the bags down, unlock the door, pick up the bags, bumble in, and try, unsuccessfully, to slam the door shut with my foot so Louise Bryant wouldn’t get out.
Before I could put the groceries down and close the door, I heard a man in the “living room,” beyond the colored parchment partition, talking in an agitated fashion in another language.
I peeked into the living room. Rocky was standing, faced-off with the man in the bad toupee. When the guy in the bad toupee saw me, he made a sharp, surprised noise, and ran toward me.
I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought he had a gun. Without even thinking, I threw the groceries at the man in the bad toupee and unleashed my brain-freezing shriek. Cans rolled and spun on the floor. The guy in the bad toupee was stunned for a moment, but not long enough for me to jump him. He ran past me, stomping on a box of Granola.
“Call the front desk,” I said to Rocky. “Tell them to stop the man in the bad toupee and call the cops.”
When I turned to run after him, I tripped on a can of chili. To his credit, Rocky came to help me up, but just made me lose my balance again.
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 8