The Chelsea Girl Murders

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Buzzer called me last night, to make up. He wants to get married.”

  “Are you going to marry him?” Maggie and I asked in unison.

  “Maybe. And if I do, I want both of you to be my witnesses. My best women. So you have to get along, for me and Buzzer,” Tamayo said. “Maggie, Robin didn’t know about you and Mike. I know she didn’t. You should apologize for getting revenge.”

  “She didn’t? Are you sure …”

  “She didn’t. I swear. Apologize.”

  “I apologize.”

  “And you promise not to play any more mean jokes.”

  “I promise not to play mean jokes on Robin,” she said, adding a nice little qualifier there. That still left the rest of the free world for her to victimize.

  “Good. Robin, now you accept Maggie’s apology. Please? It’s so important to me.”

  It took every last residual drib of Christian goodness left in the cracks of my hard heart to do it, but I said, “I accept your apology.”

  “Now, Robin, you have to admit that Maggie’s prank was brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant.”

  “It was brilliant,” I said. “EVIL genius.”

  “Really brilliant,” Tamayo repeated. “We give you points for creativity, Maggie. Okay? Shake hands.”

  We shook hands, but very quickly.

  “Peace, between two of my friends,” Tamayo said happily. “I am SO good.”

  Peace maybe, but friendship, never. I’d be watching my back for … forever.

  Tamayo? Married? These were two words I never thought I’d see side by side in a sentence. Jesus, love was breaking out all around, like a virus or something. Will people never learn?

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER the big Plotzonian caper, Phil and Helen picked me up at the Chelsea and we walked together back to the old neighborhood for a tenants’ meeting at the community center on East Tenth Street.

  “Have you been back to the building since the fire?” Helen asked.

  “Not yet. Have you?”

  “It’s grim,” she warned.

  We rounded Tenth Street from Avenue B. Even from the corner, the damage was obvious. Up close, it was heartbreaking. My windows, the windows of the apartments on both sides of me, those directly above and both stories below, looked gutted. Black soot rimmed the windows. It made me think of mascara around the eyes of a weeping woman. Bits of half-burned things still lay on the ground beside the stoop—charred photos, letters, clothing, the remains of Mr. O’Brien’s mail-order-bride magazine.

  Man oh man. That was the apartment I moved into not long after college. I’d been a young reporter in that apartment, a married woman, a divorced woman, a murder suspect, a crime fighter, an executive. Hundreds of scenes flashed before me in a slide show of memories—the day I moved in, numerous fights with Mrs. Ramirez in the hallways, the night my ex-husband proposed and the night he left me … All that history, up in smoke.

  I lingered and looked until Helen Fitkis gently tugged me away.

  The meeting was just starting when we walked into the community center. The Greek guy who owns the building and his lawyer told us they had decided to rebuild, but it was going to take time. We were given several options. We could move back in when it was done, we could break our leases, or we could move into a building he’d just bought in Brooklyn. Some insurance stuff was discussed, and Mr. Burpus asked when it would be safe to go into his old apartment just to get his things. A guy from the fire department said that “determination” would be made soon.

  After the meeting, a few of us went to a neighborhood beanery and had a bite, some beers, and reminisced about the building and the tenants who had lived there. Mrs. Ramirez was sans Señor, her Chihuahua, who had remained behind at the convent. Dulcinia Ramirez intended to return to our building and had asked all the nuns to pray for its quick restoration. It was a safe bet the nuns had been praying for that since the day she arrived.

  Mr. O’Brien and his housekeeper were hoping to return to the building too. Sally, my witchy neighbor, was going to the American Southwest to commune with spirits for a while, and didn’t think she’d be coming back. She looked tired and seemed to need a rest.

  But it was Phil, our super, and his friend Helen Fitkis who dropped the big bombshell.

  “Time to move on,” he said. We were all expecting him to announce he was going off to some refugee camp clinic somewhere, as Phil did that for a few months every year.

  But instead he said, “We’re going to retire,” Phil said. “In Liverpool.”

  “Liverpool?”

  “It’s me home, luv,” he said. “I’m seventy-five now. It’s time to go home.”

  “And you’re going too, Helen?”

  She smiled and said, “Of course.”

  “Wow. Without you guys … the building won’t be the same.”

  We all got quiet, kind of blown away by how much things were going to change for all of us. Then we hugged and said good-bye, promised we’d see each other again and keep in touch, and tried to believe it. But you know how that goes.

  epilogue

  Rocky’s fate is under negotiation. The DA wants to keep him here and prosecute him for murder and a bunch of other stuff, and the State Department wants to trade him for hostages. Public opinion is leaning toward the hostage trade. Meanwhile, Rocky’s been in jail for several weeks, and it’s a safe bet he doesn’t feel like such a big man now. For some weird reason though, I feel a bit bad for him. He got his heart broken and it made him crazy. Love makes people crazy.

  But if he gets off, if he goes home scot-free, I am going to make him pay, one way or another. I don’t know how yet. Maybe I’ll consult with Maggie Mason, see what wicked ideas she has, because I’m fairly sure it’s okay in this instance to wreak a wicked revenge, and why not put Maggie’s dark powers to use for good instead of evil?

  No charges were brought against anyone else, not Miriam or Ben, Grace or me or Nadia, thanks to our canny lawyers and our cooperation with law enforcement.

  The baby Jesus icon, which the police recovered when they arrested Rocky, is now evidence and the object of dispute between various Plotzonian sects, Russian museums, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Andrei Rublev lovers. Miriam Grundy is out more than a million bucks for the icon. It’s one of those things like the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the spear of destiny Hitler was so keen on, that is believed to have magical powers. Seems like the damned thing has caused more trouble than it has prevented, despite its legendary power to bring victory to those who possess it. But people believe what they want to believe, sometimes in defiance of all evidence.

  When Grace Rouse learned that Nadia had betrayed her and indirectly cost Gerald Woznik his life, she had a small breakdown. After weeping, in a messy, red-nosed, rat-haired way for a week, she pulled herself together and took off for a German spa to soak her worries away and meditate, stopping at JFK to tell reporters she was giving up on romance for good. From now on, she was going to be a “Whore Queen,” a rich woman who bestows her various favors on young men willing to perform heroic deeds and create great works of art to please her. Love was not a part of this transaction.

  Who knows where Nadia is? I haven’t heard from the ungrateful brat since she went back to the Chelsea to collect the money for the icon the night of Miriam’s ill-fated party, though Tamayo got an anonymized E-mail, dateline unknown, saying “Thanks” and mentioning a new boyfriend, who “really is my true love this time.”

  The Mary Sue women returned to their sweet-smelling hometowns, no doubt happier and more appreciative of home than they’d ever been before, which is a blessing in disguise for them. I’m sure they’ll all appreciate it more fully in a few years, with the right combination of family support, talk therapy, and prescription medicine.

  It’d be another month before I left the Chelsea Hotel, and I have to say, the place really grew on me in that time. Along with a healthy assortment of nutty artists, there were some fairly normalish artists and other peop
le, and a steady stream of travelers from other places. There were a lot of children who lived in the hotel with their parents. I figured they must be warped, growing up in such a bohemian place, exposed to so much art, but I met some of them and they were pretty regular kids, preternaturally smart yet somehow more innocent than most kids you meet.

  I can’t explain what it is about the Chelsea that makes it the Chelsea, beyond the idiosyncratic architecture and the residents.

  Maggie Mason, once we were back on civil (if not friendly) speaking terms, came closest to nailing the heart of the joint when I suggested over coffee at Tamayo’s that the Chelsea was “hip.”

  “Hip? Hip? It’s been on the downside of hip, it’s been on the upside of hip, it’s been ‘in the gutter looking up at the stars,’” she said. “The Chelsea isn’t hip. What the Chelsea is, is humane, through all times and fashions. It’s the most humane place I’ve ever lived. It is a place that loves art, and artists, and, in a very broad way, all of humanity.”

  Not long before I left the Chelsea, I came in late one night. Right behind me came a woman, in her thirties, a coat over her nightclothes, carrying five big shopping bags in each hand. The bags were overflowing with personal belongings. She had obviously left somewhere in a hurry. She dropped the bags at the desk without saying a word, not even thinking to ask the bellman to help her, and ran back out to a waiting taxi to ferry in ten more shopping bags. One of them had a toaster sticking out of it, another a box of Eggo frozen waffles and a whip. She made one more trip to the taxi, and came back with three more bags and a dog. The staff didn’t bat an eye at this and neither did I.

  ONE LAST THING: The Holy Woman Empire.

  While I was busy with the Plotzonian business, a major shakeup was brewing at the Worldwide Women’s Network. The stockholders and advertisers were not happy with our very modest success and were demanding changes, big changes, and they were getting them.

  Solange and Jerry had hired the executive producer of an hour-long women’s show on one of the broadcast networks to replace me. Jack Jackson and his new wife, Shonny Cobbs, met this woman at the Emmy Awards and were impressed with her success and her ideas, and asked Solange and Jerry to see if they couldn’t use her at the network. This woman had won Emmys, had been a big mucky-muck editor at a major women’s magazine, dated moguls. When Jerry and Solange suggested replacing me with her, Jack had to listen to them, and take into account that on top of the awards and other kudos, she had a proven track record in marketing and business leadership, whereas I, er, do not have those same credentials. Hey, I got street cred and that counts for something, but in the world of Big Media, her cred wins out.

  Jack told me this himself, because that’s the kind of guy he is, and because I am one of his “pets,” along with Norma, the cafeteria lady, and Dr. Larry, a philosophy Ph.D. Jack met on a plane and later hired as his “official ethicist.”

  “We’ve got another job for you,” he said. “It’s a good job. We want you to set up a programming office overseas to develop new programming and repackage existing programming. The office would be set up within an existing news bureau for the All News Network, to keep overhead down and enable resources sharing.…”

  “Where overseas?”

  “You have a choice, Robin. London and Berlin are both big bureaus with good international broadcasting contacts, but my wife, Shonny, is convinced Paris would be the best choice. Shonny says the French raised all those girly things—perfume, fashion, cosmetics—to an art, but it’s also a place with a tradition of women intellectuals. It’s the city of love. Great all-round Chick City. You speak French?”

  “I’ll learn,” I said.

  I know a job in Paris is nothing to sneer at, but all the same, it was hard to go back to work, demoted, and face Jerry and Solange. When I got back from lunch, Jerry Spurdle was waiting for me in his office, sitting in his Italian leather executive chair with his back to the door, talking on the phone. He pretended he didn’t see me, though my reflection was clearly visible in the glass wall behind him.

  “Yeah, I’m the head fox in this henhouse,” he said on the phone. “They brought me and my nine inches of alpha manhood in to dilute the estrogen quotient and provide some real leadership for these moody girls, to make sure they don’t fill up the schedule with man-bashing and wife-beater movies.”

  The line light on his phone was not lit up. He was taking to nobody. This was for my benefit.

  Suddenly, he feigned discovery of my presence, and said, “Gotta go.”

  “So what do you want, Jerry?” I said. “I gotta message to see you ASAP.”

  “Hey, Robin. I meant to tell you earlier, you’re carrying those extra pounds well.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I so admire how as you age, you become more and more defiant of those western beauty ideals. You’ve become a handsome woman, in your way.”

  It was funny. The more blatantly offensive he became, the less offended and more amused I was. The less offended I was, the more offended and offensive he became. Kick me when I’m down, Jerry. Why not?

  “Was there something else, Jerry?”

  “Yeah. Too bad about your demotion. You should have listened to me,” he said. “I know advertisers and I know programming that sells. Now look what’s happened.”

  Not a word about the ordeal I’d been through. I know he was expecting me to just absolutely lose it, and tell him what a putrid pile of sallow skin he really was.

  “Well, it’s a blessing in disguise,” I said, because saying that instead really pissed him off, and because, yeah, it was a blessing in disguise.

  It’s a demotion, sure, which normally would be kind of humiliating, and would inspire much mirth among my enemies. But it’s a demotion that will take me to Paris for six months, which is, not coincidentally, when my contract is up, and when my old apartment building will be rebuilt. It’s a demotion that prevents something worse—having to work around Jerry and Solange in the ulcer-inducing Holy Woman Empire. I won’t have to travel as much or as far either.

  As W. C. Fields said, “Don’t cry over spilt milk, it might have been poisoned,” which is another way of saying something bad can prevent something worse.

  And how cosmic can you get? I have a thing for a guy in Paris, and I’m being sent to Paris. This would be enough to restore a girl’s faith in the universe, provided she didn’t find out later that her friend Louis Levin had called up Shonny Cobbs after learning about the shakeup, that her friend Louis had made the case for Paris, and that Shonny then put a few sweet words in her husband’s ear about it.

  So, here I am, six weeks later, packing my cat and my few remaining belongings to go to Paris. Who knows what will be found there? Romance? Maybe, though Pierre now suspects I’m completely insane. Even though he knows a bit about Maggie’s reputation, he thinks I should have trusted him, and that it is a bad sign that I didn’t. Evidently, he doesn’t know how insidious and convincing Maggie’s revenge can be.

  Whatever awaits, I know it’s going to be great. I don’t speak the language, so how much trouble can my big mouth get me into there? I checked the stats on homicide in Paris, and they’re very low. They average fewer homicides in all of France than we do in New York City. The odds of having a pleasant, untroubled time during my stay in Paris are very good indeed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my long-suffering editor, Claire Wachtel. In addition to taming my prose and soothing my jangled nerves, she keeps the sticklers for time at bay with her big pitchfork, which she sharpens daily on the backbone of a long-dead Kirkus Reviews critic.

  Danny Baror, my foreign rights agent and a former Israeli tank commander, leads our underdog battle for World Domination, bringing much foreign booty into our queenly coffers, and we think we owe him many blue drinks, but for now, thanks a million.

  I’ve taken liberties with the characters and layout of the Chelsea Hotel in order to protect the privacy and security of the real residents and, er
, serve my story and own nefarious purposes. I thank the Chelsea for indulging me in this, and for so many other things, including a great deal of help with research, much of which didn’t make it into this book. To Stanley Bard, who walks the razor’s edge between business concerns and his love of artists—I could not have done it without you. Thanks to Michelle, and special thanks to David Bard, who gave me a great deal of his time to show me all the ins and outs of the hotel and share some of the better legends of the place. Jerry Weinstein, you IS the Last Manly Man, man. Bonnie Kendall, xoxo. Other Chelsea staff were also helpful and kind: Amy, Jerome, Kevon, Vincent, Pete, Damon, Timur, Steve. My neighbors and friends: Scott Griffin, Tim Moran, Jan Reddy, David and Caroline Remfry, John Wells, Arnold Weinstein, Richard Bernstein, Herbert Gentry, Jan Reddy, Paul Ramiro and Annalee Simpson, Blair and Jennifer, Tony, the Transcendent Turk, Lena, Hiroya, DeeDee, Tony on six—many thanks.

  Though the Chelsea makes an appearance in a lot of songs and literature, there is only one comprehensive history of the hotel that I know of, At the Chelsea, by Florence Turner, a wonderful book about the hotel in the 1960s. I relied heavily on this book for historical information. I also obtained information from the Chelsea Hotel web site: http://www.chelseahotel.com.

  AND THANKS TO:

  Sandi Bill, for sharing the philosophy that a bad thing could prevent something worse, which I attributed in this book to Phil. Phil himself was inspired by a guy named Bill who worked for a relief group, IMC, in a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. I lost his last name. Great guy. Too silly to die.

  Noel Behn.

  Pat Tracy

  Caroline White—no longer my editor, forever an ace dame.

  Jennifer Gould.

  Diana “My creed is wonder” Greene.

  The much-tuckerized Maggie Mason, who lends her name to a character within. Unlike the Maggie Mason in this book, the real Mary Margaret Mason hardly ever steals other women’s men—when she can help it.