“Don’t help me, call the desk,” I said, and took off down the hallway.
The man in the bad toupee had taken the stairs circling down to the first floor. I could see him two floors below me. As I ran down after him, I screamed, “Stop him! Stop the man in the bad toupee!”
I was screaming at no one.
Luckily, the man in the bad toupee was older and more sluggish than I, and I was gaining on him, with just one floor between us by the time I got to the third-floor landing. By the time he got to the ground floor, I was a mere half flight behind him. He tore through the lobby, where I ran into, literally, two of the Mary Sue convention women in pastel suits by the elevator.
“Stop the man in the bad toupee,” I screamed, pushing past them and accidentally knocking over the dark-haired, uptight one who looked like a younger, meaner Marilyn Quayle.
When I got to the street, at first the man was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw him, down the block, in front of the Aristocrat Deli, getting into a cab. It pulled away before I could reach it, but not before I’d made a note of the hack number on the top of the taxi, BF62. I looked for a cab, ready to jump in and demand that the driver “Follow that cab!” But the first available cab I saw was half a block back, behind a delivery truck and a city bus.
“BF62,” I said, reciting the hack number on the cab. I didn’t have a pen on me. So I wouldn’t forget it, I repeated it aloud as I went inside the Chelsea Hotel. With the help of a source in the taxi industry, I could track that hack and find out where the guy in the bad toupee had gone.
“BF62,” I said, getting on the elevator as the doors were about to close.
The uptight, dark-haired tourist lady in the pink suit and her shorter friend were on the elevator.
“BF62, BF62,” I said. “I have to remember those numbers, they’re very important. BF62. Do you have a pen?”
The tourist lady in the pink suit was against the wall of the elevator, looking at me with alarm. She reached into her purse, maybe for a pen or maybe for a gun.
“BF62. I’m not nuts, I just have to remember BF62, BF62, BF62.”
“Here,” said the uptight one suddenly, pulling a pen out and handing it to me while holding her body back. It was the way someone gives their wallet to a mugger: Take it, but spare my life! She must have had another bad day in the Big Apple.
“BF62,” I wrote on the back of a receipt in my pocket. “Thanks.”
We were all getting off on seven, but they held back until I was gone. As I went into Tamayo’s, I looked back and saw them poking their heads out of the elevator to make sure I was well down the hallway before getting off.
“She’s the one who found the body,” one of them said.
“She’s crazy. Did she kill him?” asked the other.
At Tamayo’s, Rocky was smoking and pacing nervously in the living room.
“Did you call the desk?”
“Yes, but they put me on hold,” he said.
“Who was that guy?”
“The man Nadia is supposed to marry,” he said. “I didn’t recognize him with the toupee, and he said he had news of Nadia, so I opened the door.…”
“Rocky, don’t let anyone in here but me. Okay? Jesus. If someone has real information on Nadia, have them call you from the house phone in the lobby. Did he have a gun?”
“Yes, a big one.”
“Fuck. Okay, I’m calling the cops,” I said.
“NO! You think the police will find Nadia before he does? Or her family does? If you call the police, you are putting Nadia’s life, and my life, at risk.”
Those people who always seem to know the right thing to do, instinctively, who don’t have to weigh all the pros and cons, are really lucky. It just seems that too often, the right thing turns out to be the wrong thing, causing some worse thing to happen.
“I have to think. You have to think too,” I said.
Rocky, with some coaxing, helped me shove an armoire in front of the door, in case the man in the bad toupee came back with a gang of wig-wearing friends. I called a guy I knew who owned a cab company and left a message asking him to find out where BF62 dropped a man in a bad toupee. It would take a day or two, he figured, to find the driver.
Rocky picked up groceries off the floor—not all of them, just the things he felt like eating at that particular moment. He wasn’t happy with the food choices and made a face.
“Did you find out anything today?” I asked him.
“No! I couldn’t find any of Nadia’s American friends. One girl, Amanda, moved to Washington. I can’t remember her last name,” he said, putting the can of chili into the microwave.
“You can’t microwave it that way,” I said. “You have to open the can and put the chili into a microwave-safe container.”
“What’s a microwave-safe container?”
“It’s … I’ll do it,” I said. I had to microwave Louise’s special cat food and bok choy dinner anyway. “Do you know Miriam Grundy?”
“Who?”
“Weren’t you supposed to meet Miriam Grundy with Nadia?”
“I don’t know. We were supposed to meet someone. I don’t remember names.”
“Nadia left here with her suitcase and stuff, and went up to see Miriam Grundy instead of waiting for you.”
“I was supposed to meet her after her meeting,” he said. “I got lost …”
The microwave dinged. He sat down at the table while I retrieved his chow and put it in front of him with a spoon and a fork.
“You’re going to have just that for lunch? Chili?”
“Do you have beer?” he asked.
“It’s in the fridge.”
“I drank what was there.”
“All of it? Well, I didn’t buy more beer,” I said. I poured him a glass of milk and put some salad-in-a-bag and fresh fruit salad on a plate for him.
“I’ll try to track the cabbie who picked up the man in the bad toupee, see where that goes. In the meantime, I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here, Rocky,” I said.
“But I must, in case Nadia comes back.”
“Well, I think we know why Nadia hasn’t come back, don’t we? Someone is definitely after her. Is there somewhere else you can go, someplace I can contact you and we can keep up-to-date on this?”
“No. There is no such place. I stay here,” he said.
The phone rang and I picked up, hoping it was Nadia, or at the very least, Maggie Mason.
“Hello,” I said.
“Robin, this is Dulcinia,” I heard.
Before she finished saying her name, I started talking again. “You have reached Tamayo Scheinman’s answering machine. Nobody is here right now. Leave a message after the beep, and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Then I hit the nine on the phone to approximate an answering-machine beep.
That was a close call. Mrs. Ramirez would keep me on the phone for hours if she could. Instead, she dictated her message into my ear.
“I am sorry I missed you, Robin. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. Señor and I are fine. We are at the Sisters of the Wretched Souls, and it’s a lovely place, an oasis of virtue, although there’s no public transportation anywhere close, and some of the nuns … a few of them seem to be more interested in cakes and pastry than prayers. Yesterday, I caught a bit of a news story during TV hour, about a mugging on East Eleventh Street. Did you see that? The police sketch looked a lot like that man—you know the one? The Russian boy who lived with the old man in the red building on Ninth Street who sat on his stoop and swore at children until he had that stroke and couldn’t swear anymore and he just spit at them?”
Until he couldn’t spit anymore, then he just opened his mouth and wheezed loudly instead, à la the bad guy in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
Mrs. Ramirez continued. “I tried calling Richard Bigger but that home number you gave me for him doesn’t work anymore, and June Fairchild isn’t returning my calls. Will you please call m
e?”
She left the number for the convent, adding that Phil had been coming by every day to visit her. “You should come by,” she said.
I didn’t call her back. But she had given me an idea. I called Phil and asked if he could do me a favor and install one of his superb security systems at Tamayo’s. If I’d had the time, I’d have set up my own system, which is cheap, easy, and yet innocent looking. But it takes time to grow the poison ivy. It takes time to fill the tin cans with marbles and string them together. It takes time to record the loud, insane laughter that greets an intruder who doesn’t know to pull the little wire sticking out under the door that disables the system.
“Luv, you don’t know how much I would like to leave New Jersey and come in to see you,” he said. In the background, I could hear Helen and her kin arguing politics, which is a subject Phil tries to avoid as much as possible.
After I hung up, I asked Rocky again where Plotzonia was.
“It won’t help find Nadia if you know. It will only lead to trouble.”
“How?”
“You might tell someone.”
“You have to trust me,” I said. “I’m trying to help, goddammit.”
Unyielding, he responded by spooning another large ladle of chili into his mouth. He was trying to do it in a cool, defiant way, but some of the red-bean goo dribbled down the side of his mouth and onto his chin. He wiped it away angrily. I found this oddly endearing.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s just relax awhile. Clear our heads. There’s no beer, but we have some wine.”
Over goblets of a nice burgundy, I asked him a few questions—what kind of music did he like, what was the last movie he saw, coaxing him into more specific territory that might reveal the name of his homeland or some pertinent information. But it’s a global village. His favorite music was hip hop and rock, the last movie he saw was The Blair Witch Project. We talked for a good hour, but I learned little.
“You grew up here in America?” I asked.
“Here and in my homeland.”
“Where did you meet Nadia?”
“At a party.”
“In America?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez, slow down, Rocky, I’m being buried under this blizzard of information,” I said, getting up to let Phil in.
Phil was good with the kid. When I’d told Rocky I wanted to bring a friend in to secure the joint, he had protested. But Phil disarmed him with his self-effacing charm and a few funny stories of Mrs. Ramirez among the Good Sisters. At the same time, Phil armed me, giving me Mrs. Ramirez’s pearl-handled pistol and some bullets, which he’d insisted on taking from Mrs. R. before she went into the convent. I hate guns, especially illegal, unregistered weapons. But it wasn’t the first time I’d had to break the law for a higher purpose, i.e., to prevent me from becoming a headless torso buried upside down in the Arthur Kill landfill. I calculated the risk this way: This was the age of Titanic and Shakespeare in Love, and no jury in the land would convict a woman for aiding and abetting so-called romance once this story came out (and was properly spun). As far as my professional reputation was concerned, I programmed a network aimed at women and girls and this kind of publicity couldn’t hurt us, provided the story had a happy ending. That was the trick.
While Phil installed the security system with the help of the manboy, I called every friend of Tamayo’s in New York who I could remember meeting. Most of these were comedians and none were home. I got a series of “disconnected number” recordings and answering machines, some with “funny” outgoing messages, and some with very quick, straightforward messages. It seemed the funnier the comic, the more straight the answering-machine message.
When I exhausted the New York friends, I started dialing the out-of-town Americans. After more answering machines, I got my friend Claire, a White House correspondent in Washington.
“Oh, you’re talking about Tamayo’s underground railroad,” Claire said.
“Underground railroad?”
“For runaway lovers.”
“Underground railroad for runaway lovers. Are you a part of it?”
“I haven’t participated yet except financially,” Claire said. “But yes, I knew about it. You know, these young girls—and boys—from restricted cultures are attracted to her freedom and attitude. She’s a magnet for them.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that in Tokyo and New York too, the kids who come up to her with their tales of woe,” I said.
“She has been helping some of these kids she meets, here and there, for about a year.”
“Helping them how?”
“With money, contacts, and inspiration too I guess. She has helped a few escape with their lovers before arranged marriages could take place. She finagled college tuition for a girl she met in a refugee camp who wanted to go to school against her family’s wishes,” Claire said. “In Thailand, she bought a young girl and her brother out of prostitution. Those are just the ones I know about, because I helped finance them.”
“Jeez, Tamayo never told me about an underground railroad. But then, we’ve both been traveling a lot,” I said. Still, I was miffed at being left out of this. Did Tamayo not trust me?
“She probably forgot or didn’t want to bother you. She has this railroad organized very loosely,” Claire said. “Information is given out on a need-to-know basis because of the danger these kids could be in. It was kind of inspired by those anarchist econuts you were mixed up with last year.”
“Do you know this girl named Nadia? I think she’s from a former Soviet republic or eastern bloc country? She came through on this ‘railroad.’”
“No,” Claire said.
“Do you know who else is on this railroad?”
“No. I don’t know much. I just write the checks. And I haven’t heard from Tamayo in weeks. If I hear from her, I’ll have her call you. I haven’t heard from you in a while either. How are you?”
We chitchatted for a bit. Claire was just back from the road herself, having gone with the President to California for a fundraiser followed by a Pacific Rim economic summit in Vancouver, Canada. She was still seeing her guy, an attaché at the Chilean embassy.
“And you? Really sorry about the fire. But when God closes a door—”
“My foot is in it at the time,” I finished. “It’s okay, actually. I haven’t really had time to think about the fire because of the murder and the missing girl …”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Well, I met this guy in Paris, a friend of Tamayo’s …”
“Pierre?” Claire said.
“Yes. You know him?”
“He’s a dreamboat, isn’t he? I met him there last year. If I wasn’t so in love with Salvatore, I would have jumped him,” she said. “Did you?”
“None of your business.”
“Since when?”
“Someone is at the door, Claire. I’ve got to go,” I lied, and hung up. It made me so uncomfortable that she knew Pierre too, for some reason.
“Take a look at this, Robin,” Phil said. “This is a dandy system. I ran the wire around the balcony doors, right under the baseboards. You can’t even see them. You’ll have to punch in a code on the keyboard outside to get in, but it’ll make you feel secure.”
He demonstrated how it worked, and how to program in the entry code. I picked my birthday, 0818, and made Rocky memorize it too.
I wanted to get Phil alone to find out what he had learned from Rocky, but it was almost suppertime. Rocky was hungry—again—and so was Phil. Phil offered to cook for us, but I owed him. I put on Tamayo’s Escher print apron, hanging from a white mannequin hand on the wall by the refrigerator, and cooked for the menfolk. At Rocky’s age, it wouldn’t be long before he went back into the bathroom with Cosmo, leaving Phil and me alone to talk about him.
While I cooked, Phil talked about out East Village neighbors. Phil was worried about Mrs. Ramirez at the convent. Without her crime watch to keep her occupied, she was turning
more and more to prayer and penance, and things were getting a bit competitive with some of the other nuns, vis-à-vis, “Who loves Jesus best?” Mrs. Ramirez had sniped a bit about one of the nuns in particular, Sister Teresa, who ran the convent bakery marketing department and spent four times as much time watching financial news on cable as she did on her knees in prayer. Mrs. Ramirez had kindly pointed this out to Sister Teresa at breakfast, prompting Sister Teresa to thank Mrs. Ramirez for her record-keeping and concern, and to point out kindly that she, Sister Teresa, had been in this nun business for sixteen years. Her devotion to the Savior was total, she assured Mrs. R., and her interest in financial matters was purely in service to the mission of the convent. At that point, the Mother Superior changed the subject to the work of an overseas mission, thereby preventing a really ugly slap-fight between an old, blue-haired lady and a nun.
“I was hoping you’d be able to go out and visit her, luv,” Phil said. “Tell her some news, get her mind on other things. But it looks like you’re tied up.”
“Yeah, but give her my best when you see her,” I said. “Et cetera, et cetera.”
“I shall. Have they arrested anyone in that murder?”
“Not yet. But the consensus among people in the hotel is that it was a crime of passion,” I said. “What a shame. That happens all too often; people think they’re in love, end up killing each other.”
If Rocky picked up the cleverly hidden moral of the story, he didn’t show it.
“I hope they get the guilty party,” Phil said.
“Me too. Dinner’s ready.”
While we ate, Phil and I tried to wheedle something out of Rocky about his homeland, about Nadia’s friends, where they were planning to be married and honeymoon, in case Nadia had gone there. He assured me she had not. It was hopeless. The boy would not talk. After two plates of food, a beer, and a big bowl of ice cream, he excused himself, saying he wanted to take a bath, and left me and Phil alone.
“Let’s take our coffee out to the balcony,” Phil said, acting as though he was the host and I was the guest.
It was just nightfall. The pale pink streetlights gave a surreal, romantic cast to the street, a kind of noirish elegance that reminded me of Paris. The Chelsea Hotel sign, an old-fashioned neon sign suspended vertically from the middle of the building, started to buzz, flickered, and then lit up. Some of the letters were orange neon, some pink, all mixed up together. Across the street, the orange YMCA sign was on too. The moon hung in the sky exactly between these two signs. From Lucia’s apartment came the strains of that spooky, sad carnival music she liked so much.
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 9