“Maybe not. But she’s pretty schizo,” Edna said.
“Do you know where Nadia went from here?” I asked.
“I don’t, hon,” Edna said. “You girls want some café con leche with a li’l brandy?”
“No, but you go ahead,” Maggie said. “The hotel keeps a log of all outgoing phone calls that go through the house phone system, doesn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“If you could get us a list of the calls made from Tamayo’s place the day of Gerald’s death, it would really help.”
“I could get into a lot of trouble, Mary Margaret,” Edna said.
“We’re on a romantic mission to reunite Nadia and her lover, Edna. Do it for the young lovers. For Tamayo, who helped them out.”
“Oh, Maggie …”
“How’s Ernie?” Maggie asked.
Edna’s eyes misted over. She smiled and clicked her tongue. “He’s in Panama. He got a fever down there but he’s better now.”
To me, she said, “Ernie’s my husband. Met him here at the Chelsea when he was in port and staying here. That was 1989. We were married in 1993.”
“That was a wedding for the record books,” Maggie said. “We had it on the Chelsea roof.”
“This is his last year on the water. Want to see a picture? He’s a sweet-looking man, ain’t he?” Edna said.
“He sure is,” I said.
“He sure is,” she repeated. “Okay, Maggie, I’ll get you the phone list. After seven, after the Bards have gone home, when I have a free moment, I’ll poke around. Did I tell you about the man asking about Nadia?”
“What man? A man in a bad toupee?” I asked.
“No. But I’ve seen that guy here several times recently,” Edna said. “Was he looking for Nadia?”
“Yes. What man are you talking about?” I asked.
“A man a few years older than me, gray hair, blue eyes,” Edna said. “He was here yesterday. A foreigner.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I tol’ him nothin’,” Edna said.
After I paid the check, Edna said, “Something else, I didn’t tell you. It just occurred to me. After Grace called to talk to me, she asked to be transferred to one of the rooms. I forgot all about it. But come to think of it, I believe she asked to be transferred to 711. That’s Tamayo’s room.”
“Yes it is,” Maggie said. “What time was that?”
“Afternoon-ish,” she said.
“That was the day of the murder. Where were you at that time, Robin?”
“At work,” I said.
“Thanks for lunch,” Edna said, getting up to go. “I gotta take a nap now.”
After she had left, Maggie and I sat there silently for a while, and then went upstairs to make some calls, assuredly thinking the same thing: Grace Rouse had called Nadia the day of Gerald’s death. Grace Rouse had told me she didn’t know Nadia.
chapter twelve
“Robin, I don’t know anything about this Nadia person,” Spencer Roo said to me on the phone.
Grace Rouse was not in her office and nobody would tell me where she was at the moment, giving rise to my fears that she was en route to some nasty country without an extradition treaty with the United States. She was rich enough that she could run out on a bail of two million bucks, which is what she’d coughed up to get out of jail.
“No, no, she’s off dealing with some bad-boy painter,” Roo said. “I’ll have her call you.”
I was tempted to tell him everything I knew and/or assumed about this case, but in the event she was the killer I didn’t want to tip Rouse off. The new theory was, Rouse thought Gerald was meeting a lover, either pregnant or with a baby, his baby, so she went to the Chelsea, killed him, maybe killed her. Nadia’s corpse hadn’t turned up yet, but I wasn’t reassured. If she was alive, why hadn’t she called? Nadia may have fled as soon as Gerald was shot. Rouse then could have gone down the fire escape, caught up with Nadia on the street, followed her, and shot her in some dark, quiet place. Until I heard from Nadia, all bets were off.
“I told you Rouse was a psychopathic liar,” Maggie said.
“She spoke well of you,” I said.
“Really?”
“No. In fact, she claimed you put a personal ad on her behalf in a Star Trek magazine.”
“Moi?” Maggie said. “That’s ridiculous.”
Now, if I didn’t know so much about Maggie Mason and her history of vindictive cruelty, I would have believed her. She was scarily believable when she said that. At the same time, I figured if Maggie had known how much I knew about her she wouldn’t have even attempted to protest.
“It’s too bad we don’t know which bad-boy artist Grace is baby-sitting,” Maggie said. “We’d be able to track her down through him.”
“I don’t remember her saying his name, and Roo didn’t know,” I said. “But he’s someone with a boyfriend and a psychic and fears his mother.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much I’m afraid.”
My cell phone rang.
It was my taxi source. He had a phone number for cabbie license BF62, who was expecting my call.
THE TAXI DRIVER of BF62 remembered the guy in the bad toupee, though he couldn’t describe his facial features beyond the fact that the man had brown eyes. I remembered he had brown eyes too, when I’d seen him in Tamayo’s apartment earlier. But why did I remember the man in the toupee having blue eyes at the Thai restaurant, unless it had something to do with the lighting of the place, or my own memory problems, due to age, information overload, drug experimentation, or just being metaphorically gored in the head by traumatic events a time or two in my lifetime?
BF62, whose name was Jean-Michel, took Bad Toupee uptown to Park Avenue and Thirtieth Street. After the man in the bad toupee paid the driver, he removed the hairpiece and got out. The mystery man then crossed the street, and tried unsuccessfully to hail another cab. BF62 pulled a U-ie, and picked up the mystery man again. The driver said the man with the bad toupee didn’t realize he’d just been picked up by the same cab that had dropped him off. Evidently, the man was planning to take two different cabs in order not to leave a trail.
Now I understood the toupee, and the blue eyes/brown eyes thing. Come to think of it, the guy in Tamayo’s apartment had had a slighter build than the one I’d seen in the Thai restaurant. The bad toupee was a disguise, one that attracted attention to a strange physical feature, distracting from other features. It had been used by criminals many times before. Most recently, in the 1980s, a league of redheaded black women posing as maids had run a theft ring up in Westchester. In that case, the victim’s own prejudices helped the thieves work their scam too. Rich, lily-white Scarsdale matrons who reported thefts weren’t able to describe the culprits beyond, “she was a black woman with dyed red hair.”
At the end of the second cab ride, the mystery man got out on Bowery, just past Bleecker, at a place called the Bus Stop Bar & Grill. After he got out, he put the bad toupee back on.
I hung up and said, “The guy in the bad toupee went to the place on the matchbook I found in that book Man Trap,” I said. “The Bus Stop Bar and Grill. I’m going back there.”
“I’m going with you,” Maggie said.
“That’s not necessary,” I said.
“Grace Rouse is accusing me of murder. I want to get this cleared up,” she said with that serrated edge to her voice. The rasp softened when she said, “And I want to see the lovers reunited.”
“We both know, deep down, it won’t work out. He’s such a spoiled little princeling, his hormones are teenage hormones. How long before he’s got a piece on the side? And she’s a demanding, ungrateful little—”
“Now is not the time to be cynical,” she said.
We crept out of the Chelsea through the basement as cautious as Mossad agents, holding close to the walls, and peering down every nook and alley of the dark Chelsea basement with a flashlight as we made our way out through the back entrance to Twen
ty-second Street, where we grabbed a cab. Both of us wore reversible coats and had scarves so we could quickly and economically disguise ourselves. I had Mrs. Ramirez’s gun with me and Maggie had pepper spray.
“I should warn you about the owner of this place we’re going to, Stinky. He smells.”
“Brilliant nickname,” Maggie said.
“His wife, Irene, lost her sense of smell.”
“He smells and she can’t smell?”
“He has enough smell for both of them. Also, he has a roving eye and she seems to be insanely jealous,” I said.
“What came first, I wonder, her jealousy or his roving eye?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did he start to smell after she lost her sense of smell?”
“I’m guessing it happened after she lost her sense of smell.”
“Without his wife to tell him to clean himself, he got ripe, eh?” Maggie asked. “Just as it says in Man Trap, men are half-dumb animals who need to be trained and watched over.”
“Yeah? That’s what Grace Rouse said too,” I said.
“Is that it? Ahead? Bus Stop Bar and Grill.”
“That’s it.”
Lucky for us, Stinky was not there, having gone around the block to see his brother, who ran a garage, “or so he says,” Irene added with suspicion. She was a tad curious why two women wanted to speak to Stinky so bad, and me a repeat visitor on top of that. Again, I dropped Tamayo’s name, and she quizzed me on Tamayo the same way Miriam and Edna had to make sure we really were friends.
“You’re sure you’re not using this as an excuse to get close to Stinky?”
“I promise you we’re not,” I said.
“Why? What’s wrong with Stinky?” She asked this accusingly, and I got the feeling that she’d be just as upset if we weren’t interested in Stinky as if we were.
“He’s not our type. We only date black men and Koreans,” I said. This she accepted.
After I explained again about Nadia and about the cab dropping off the guy in the bad toupee here, she said, “There were two men with bad toupees. One came in and waited, and another came in. They were looking for that girl; she wasn’t here, so they stayed and had drinks, talked in another language.”
“Were they wearing crosses that looked like this?” I asked, showing her the St. Michael cross.
“I don’t think so. Lemme think. All I remember is they both wore bad toupees, and one had brown eyes and one had blue,” she said.
“This girl is the one they were looking for?” I asked, showing her Nadia’s photo again.”
“Could be.”
“You haven’t seen her?” I said. Something about her made me think she was holding out. Except when she was glaring in anger, she was shifty-eyed.
“No.”
“How would they know to come here, unless one of them had tracked Nadia?” I asked. “Look, if you know something, you have to tell me. It is urgent. Do it for Tamayo.”
After staring at me hard, she finally admitted, “Nadia was here, for a coupla days. I only took her in because she was a friend of Tamayo’s.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Nadia warned me not to breathe a word of this, that her life was at stake. I didn’t like the girl, but I didn’t want her death on my conscience.”
“She was here two days. And then?”
“I asked her to leave. She was making a play for Stinky,” Irene said. “I take her in, she makes a play for my husband. Is that ungrateful?”
“A lot of women make plays for Stinky?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah. It’s worse than ever since he started taking Viagra. Women go for him now like bees to honey,” she said.
“Where did Nadia go next?” I asked.
“I put her in a cab to go to my sister’s in Queens. My sister’s a widow, and believe me, she can use the company and the help around the house ever since her leg went gouty. Nadia stayed there until yesterday. Don’t know where she went from there.”
“Where did she stay while she was here? Did she leave anything behind?”
“Follow me,” Irene said.
We went back with her, through a doorway covered by a blanket, to the back hallway, lit with one bright, naked bulb. The door was open to the staff washroom, where a tap dripped loudly, and there were peeling health department posters on the cracking white walls.
“Stinky and I, we live upstairs,” Irene said. “I didn’t want her up there with us, so I put her in here with the dry goods.”
She opened a door to a storage room where huge bottles of pickled eggs, giant cans of ketchup, towels, and jugs of wine were stored. In the middle of the room was a small cot. There were barely two inches of space between the cot and the walls.
“It was a tight squeeze, but she was safe here. This door locks. The storefront is barred and alarmed at night,” she said. “After we close up, we bring the dogs, two Dobermans, down to the bar. That’s why Tamayo chose us, I guess.”
“Did Nadia make any calls? Mention any names? Discuss any business?”
“She said was just staying until things were okay at the place she was staying before, then she was going to go back to pick up something,” Irene said. “I don’t know anything more than that.”
Before we left, I asked, “How do you know Tamayo?”
“Stinky and I met her in Atlantic City. She was doing her act in one of the big hotels, and afterward we talked to her and her boyfriend at the time,” Irene said.
“Did Tamayo hit on Stinky?” I asked.
“No, she never did, wonder of wonders. She joked with him that the reason he got his nickname was because he smelled bad. That always cracked me and Stinky up.”
“How did Stinky get his nickname?”
“His poker buddies gave him that name because he stinks at poker,” Irene said. “Don’t you be going to the garage to see Stinky now.”
“Okay, Irene. We won’t,” Maggie said.
“You promise?”
“We promise.”
Irene let us out the back way. We reversed our coats and hailed a cab.
“She’s a jealous bitch, Irene, but I can’t help liking her,” Maggie said. “She doesn’t have a clue about her husband, eh?”
“No, and I was tempted to tell her. ‘Your husband is not that attractive, Irene. I wouldn’t worry about him stepping out on you, unless there’s a whole bunch of women out there who lost their senses of smell in pesticide-plant accidents.’ The problem is, nobody tells her. Everyone is too polite I guess.”
“Where are these imaginary rivals of hers?”
“My theory is, Stinky flirts with women, who get a kick out of the fact that he’s a smelly old bastard who still flirts, and they’re nice to him because they’re polite and he seems harmless, and Irene mistakes that for interest on the part of the women.”
“I’m sorry I missed meeting him. Why weren’t you honest with her?” Maggie asked.
“I dunno. It’s kind of romantic, in a weird way; he smells, but she has no sense of smell, he thinks he’s irresistible, and she thinks he’s irresistible. It works for them somehow.”
“Are they happy?”
“My quick impression of them together was that they were happy, in a weird way …”
“Of course.”
“I wonder if he’s a serious flirt, or if he just does it to keep Irene interested. He can’t be doing it because it works,” I said.
“Love is mysterious,” Maggie said, sighing. “Maybe Rocky and Nadia are happy in a weird way too.”
Maggie was determined to view the young lovers as romantic. She seemed so nice, so humane, that I wondered for a moment if Mike had exaggerated her viciousness. But then I remembered what he’d told me about her spring-coiled rage, how she could go along, sweet as pie, thoughtful and humane, and then suddenly shoot fire through her nostrils. I’ve had a few moments like that myself, but evidently Maggie had these fiery outbursts regularly, like
clockwork.
The cab dropped us in Corona, Queens. Irene’s sister Daisy lived in a semidetached yellow brick house with a small, weedy yard. It took her a while to come to the door, due to her “gouty leg,” which she apologized for as she hobbled a few feet back to a big green vinyl recliner, patched over with brown fiber tape in several spots.
From the outside, it looked like a perfectly normal person lived here. And almost everything about the inside was pretty average, from the JC Penney oak-finish furniture and the Irish-lace doilies on the tables to the crocheted red-and-white afghan thrown over the brown houndstooth sofa. All very ordinary looking, except for all the dwarves—a hundred or so ceramic dwarves. It was kind of creepy, all those jolly, fat-cheeked dwarf faces staring at us from bookshelves, atop the TV, the mantel, end tables and corner tables. This confirmed my theory that there are no truly normal, ordinary people in the world—scratch the surface, go behind their closed doors, and everyone is an oddball in some way.
“Nice dwarves,” I said.
“Thank you. I’ve got over seven hundred of them. I’ve been collecting them for three years. So you want to know about the girl?”
“Yes. She was …”
“She was here. Irene told me she’d help me out, get things for me. I don’t get around so well anymore, and I need some help salving my sores, because I can’t bend down to reach my lower leg. The nurse only comes in part-time.…”
“How long was she here?”
“Just a day, and then she disappeared. I asked her to go into the bathroom and get my salve and heat me a towel in the dryer. She got up, walked away, and the next thing I know the door slammed. She never came back. That was last night.”
“Any idea where she might have gone next?”
“I don’t know where she could go, Robin. She didn’t have much money,” Daisy said.
“Are you sure?” Maggie asked.
“That’s what she said.”
“Did she talk about her homeland or her friends here in America, anything?”
“She complained,” Daisy said. “The bed was too hard, I don’t have the right kind of soda, my TV programs are stupid, the dwarves scared her. The dwarves scared her! My adorable dwarves!”
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 15