Looker

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Looker Page 16

by Michael Kilian


  If he put any of this into the newspaper, his attacker might not be satisfied with a mere beating.

  And he’d never see Camilla Santee again.

  He looked at his watch and stood up. Maybe Jackie O. would show this time.

  She didn’t, but Vanessa did. A.C. had left a message for her with the copy clerks inviting her to lunch at the Carlyle Hotel and asking that she join him at the museum. She caught up with him as he stood pondering one of Kotlowitz’s abstracts, a plastic glass of white wine in his hand.

  “That painting looks like your face, sweetheart,” she said.

  “I saw her last night,” he said.

  “Your wife? Kitty?”

  “No. Camilla Santee. I went to her apartment.”

  “And she did this to you?”

  “No. She’s very nice, as nice as she is beautiful.”

  “Have you two named the date?”

  “I only kissed her.”

  “The rake’s progress. Next you’ll be holding hands.”

  “I’m just trying to help her. In any event, I don’t think I’ll be seeing her for a while.” He moved on to the next painting.

  “At last, wisdom. You still haven’t explained what happened to your face.”

  “I was mugged. On the street. It had nothing to do with her.” Another lie.

  “Is this what you wanted to see me about, chéri? Why you had me come all the way up here? A kiss and a mugging?”

  “No,” he said. “I really am going to take you to lunch. At the Carlyle.”

  It was a block away.

  Rated the best hotel in America, and one of the five best in the world, the Carlyle offered discretion, civility, and old-fashioned elegance compatible with its Upper East Side surroundings and clientele. It served old-money people the way the Plaza did glamour and glitz. When they started shooting fashion models outside the Carlyle, then A.C. would know civilization was in trouble.

  Its restaurant was small but had an equally considerable reputation. A.C. was known there, and given his favorite table near the large fireplace that dominated the room.

  “This is all very nice,” said Vanessa, after they had ordered, “but you’d be doing yourself a lot more good if you were back at the office helping out on this story.”

  “There’s nothing I can do that would help.”

  “They think there is. They think you have a ‘special relationship’ with the coppolas in this. I think we’re making up half the stuff we’re running on this story, but the other papers are still beating us.”

  “My relationship with the cops is no better than yours is.”

  “If they find out about your ‘special relationship’ with the fair Camilla, they’ll really be ready to run you through the presses.”

  “I don’t have a relationship. I hardly know her.”

  “But as you say, quel frisson, she kissed you.”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  “You’re in trouble, A.C. Even with City Hall.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you know? The mayor singled you out at his press conference today. You’re typical of the irresponsible, sensation-mongering media who’ll do anything for a headline, even tip off a wanted criminal that the police are looking for him. You have blood on your hands, he said.”

  A.C.’s hand went to his injured face.

  “They pulled your column because the mayor called up Bill Shannon,” Vanessa continued.

  “And he wants my help because of my ‘special relationship’ with the police?”

  “Shannon’s angry that he had to do that. He’s afraid we’re going to lose the story now.”

  A waiter poured a small amount of St. Julien into A.C.’s wineglass. He sniffed it, sipped, and then nodded.

  “I almost wish I was back in Belfast.”

  “Not much haute couture there, sweetheart.”

  He said nothing. Vanessa took a large swallow of her wine.

  “A.C.,” she said finally. “I ran into Jeffrey Darlington at a show this morning. He’s going to be the editor of the American edition of Beau Monde, the magazine they’re starting up.”

  “My felicitations.” The wine was excellent. It was the only thing about the day that was.

  “He talked to me about writing for them.”

  “You ought to do it. I’m sure they’ll pay well.”

  “He also asked me if I thought there was any chance you might be interested. A monthly social column. Plus commentary on the arts. Trips abroad.”

  “Serendipity.”

  “And I’ll bet twice your salary.”

  “How can I possibly work for a publication Katherine Shannon doesn’t own?” He said this with great bitterness.

  “It might do your marriage—or what’s left of it—a world of good. You were your own man when Kitty fell for you. Become one again.”

  “I think the only thing that would please her now is for me to become a priest.”

  “You ought to talk to Darlington, anyway. And when you go up to Westchester this weekend you ought to tell Kitty about it.”

  “But she doesn’t want me to come up.”

  “Go anyway. Assert yourself. After all, a man who’s been kissed by Camilla Santee ought to be able to do anything he sets his mind to, n’est-ce pas?”

  A peculiar look came over her face. He studied her, but couldn’t figure it out.

  “Maybe you don’t have a special relationship with les cops,” she said, “but they seem to have one with you.”

  He turned. Two huge, improbable figures stood at the entrance foyer of the restaurant—Detective Lanham and his partner Petrowicz, the latter wearing a sport coat far more suitable for a Wilkes-Barre Ramada Inn. The maître d’ came up to them but they ignored him. Lanham, spotting A.C., nodded once. It was a summons.

  A.C. took them back to the lobby, motioning Lanham to one of the red velvet settees that flanked the steps leading to the revolving door and the street outside. There was room only for the two of them and it was crowded at that. Petrowicz stood nearby, arms folded, eyeing passersby as might a soldier of occupation.

  “I thought I told you ‘off the record,’ goddammit,” Lanham said. His voice was low and very gruff.

  “You said ’not for quote.’ It’s not the same.”

  “The fucking result is the same.”

  “I’m sorry. I was just doing my job.”

  Lanham paused as two aging blond women in fur coats met at the center of the lobby and embraced. As they swept on out the door, Lanham turned to watch them.

  “How did you know I was here?” A.C. said.

  “I am a police detective.”

  “That pimp you told me about. You think he’s Molly Wickham’s killer?”

  Lanham grimaced. “That’s bullshit,” he said quietly. One of the desk clerks was looking at them curiously.

  “I know you know it’s bullshit,” he continued, turning to lean close to A.C. “But it won’t do anybody any good right now to try to put that in the paper, so let’s keep it off the record.”

  “Yes.”

  “Off the record.”

  “Right.”

  “What the mayor said today, about your having blood on your hands, that’s bullshit, too. Aggravated bullshit. That woman got killed because of some very bad police work, but also because she made her living and got her jollies being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Bad police work?”

  “That’s—”

  “Off the record. I understand.”

  Lanham looked down at the backs of his hands, then turned them over, exposing the light skin of the palms.

  “I’m trusting you, Mr. James, because I don’t have much choice. I’m in a box on this case right now. My superiors are a little distracted by the events of last night. They’re not much interested in my theories, in the things we talked about.”

  “I’m not as sure about all that as I was.”

  “Don’t jive
me, man.” The street talk didn’t seem to fit him. “What you told me about the man in the limousine makes sense. The feds are sticking their noses into this case and it may have something to do with him, whoever he is. I’m trying to get a lead on him. I made an inquiry through Interpol on that Delasante woman in France, but I’ve had no reply yet. I think they can both tell us a lot.”

  “That was just speculation on my part.”

  “Bull shit.” He dragged the two words out.

  “Detective Lanham—”

  “I need your help, Mr. James. I’m not just talking about your civic duty as a citizen. You saw what happened to Molly Wickham. We don’t know why it happened. Until we do, we sure as hell can’t just presume that it isn’t going to happen to somebody else.”

  A.C. rubbed his face nervously. “I really can’t tell you any more than I have,” he said.

  “Yes you can. I went through the clips of some of your old columns. You move in this world, Mr. James.” He gestured at the lobby. “You live in it. You hear their gossip. You pass a lot of it on in your column. These people talk to you all the time, gladly. I’ll bet you can find out a lot about this Delasante woman, things we never could.”

  “Really, I never heard of her before.”

  Lanham took out one of his snitch cards. On the back, he wrote down two other numbers—his home phone and the number of the dispatcher’s office where he could be reached over the portable. He handed it to A.C. with great seriousness, as though it were the key to something quite valuable.

  “If you hear anything,” Lanham said, “call me. If something jars your memory, call me. If you get some strange idea about this, call me. I’m going to be busy but you can always reach me.”

  “Yes sir.” A.C. carefully placed the card in his Dunhill wallet. In doing so, he briefly revealed the picture of Camilla Santee he had cut from a magazine and put with his other wallet photographs. Lanham could have seen it, but appeared not to have noticed.

  “How did you hurt your face?” the detective asked.

  A.C. hesitated. “I had too much to drink last night and got into a fight.” It was what everyone thought, so maybe he would be believed.

  “It’s a rough neighborhood, the Upper East Side.”

  A.C. smiled. Lanham stood up, and so A.C. did the same.

  “Have you … have you talked to Miss Santee again?” A.C. asked.

  “All I get is her answering machine.”

  “It’s a busy time for models.”

  “Her agency said they don’t know where she is.”

  A.C. slipped his wallet back into his suit coat pocket. “I’ll help you as much as I can.”

  “Thank you.”

  The two policemen departed as though in a great hurry.

  Vanessa was eating her salad, unhappily.

  “They’re not joining us for lunch?” she said.

  A.C. slumped into his chair and drank some of his wine. “No.”

  “What did they want? More pictures to show us?”

  He stared at his plate. He’d lost all appetite for food.

  “I’ve got to find Camilla,” he said.

  “She can wait until after my entrée,” Vanessa said.

  Camilla spent most of the day avoiding her apartment and its predatory telephone, losing herself in the city and trying to concentrate her thoughts. She went first to Greenwich Village, wandering from bookstore to coffeehouse to boutique, and then moved on to SoHo, poking into new galleries and pretending to be absorbed by some very bad art. Lunchtime found her down at the Battery and its harbor-front park, slouched on a bench with her long legs thrust out in front of her, unmindful of the rain that pattered on her hat and raincoat. The sky was low and murky, but she could see across the dirty water to the dark silhouette of Staten Island.

  She had grown up near such a battery point; had spent many a rainy afternoon gazing solemnly at a distant island.

  No island was distant enough.

  A tanker was wallowing heavily in the Upper Bay, backing away from the Jersey shore and turning, preparing to follow the channel out through the Narrows into the open sea. Tugs and smaller boats moved around it like pests.

  The gray-green water was oily, and dotted with floating bits she didn’t want to look at closely. She could easily imagine Pierre Delasante’s huge, bloated body floating among it all. Such a sight would not be at all upsetting.

  She remembered her father’s dead face, drained of blood that had flowed out of a knife wound. Her half sister Danielle had died in an upstairs bedroom of the family house, having put her father’s pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger while everyone else was downstairs at dinner. Camilla could still hear the sound. When Molly Wickham had been shot, it was Danielle that Camilla saw.

  Every violent death sickened her after Danielle. Camilla never read murder stories in the newspapers. She never watched the television news or any of the crime shows.

  Now, here she sat, contemplating murder quite calmly. It was not only possible and plausible for her to murder Pierre; it was something she devoutly wished to do.

  If it would do any good, which it would not. He’d seen to that.

  A man farther down the promenade was standing very still, observing her. She couldn’t recognize him at the distance. She didn’t want to see him any more closely. Rising and turning, she lifted the collar of her raincoat and began walking rapidly away.

  On impulse, she headed for the landing of the Pan Am water shuttle, which made almost hourly runs up the East River to LaGuardia. She had a nearly twenty-minute wait upon reaching it, but no strange man drew near.

  On the trip upriver, she stood on the forward deck, finding the wind and rain exhilarating and cleansing. The boat made a stop at the Thirty-fourth Street docks. She could have gotten off there, but kept her place, pleased when the engines rumbled and the craft got under way again. By the time they reached the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, however, she was feeling alone and unhappy again. She ran to the head of the cab line, smiling sweetly at a weary-looking older man as she hurried past him and into the taxi that he’d been about to enter. She promised the driver an extra $10 to ignore the ensuing complaints and get the hell out of there. He was content to do so. This was New York.

  Once home, she turned on only one lamp in her living room, and then went directly to her answering machine, dropping her hat and raincoat on the floor.

  The tape was nearly full. A few of the calls were from the police detective who had questioned her after Molly Wickham’s murder. Some were from A.C. James. Most were from the person she feared hearing from most.

  Camilla was worried about A.C. James, but the only person she called back was Evelyn Livingston, her booker at the modeling agency.

  “Camilla? Gloriosky, girl, where have you been?”

  “I’m awfully sorry, Evie. I—I’ve just gone all to pieces with this murder.”

  “Well, you’re costing yourself a fortune with these cancellations. I even had a perfume commercial lined up. Residuals, darling, lovely residuals.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you were desperate for money.”

  “I am. I … Evie, I want you to get me an out-of-town booking. I want to get out of New York for a while.”

  “They’ll snap you up in a minute for Paris and Milan.”

  “No. Not Europe. Nothing in Europe. But anything here. Miami, Chicago. Anywhere. I just have to get out of New York.”

  There was a long pause, as Evelyn checked booking requests on her computer.

  “Well, I don’t see anything at the moment, dear. But I’ll make every effort.”

  “You’re my only friend, Evie. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  She hung up. There was another call she now wanted to make, but she hadn’t thought yet what to say.

  Cassidy had left a file folder full of computer printouts for Lanham, the sum total of his labors in tracking the names of Molly Wickham, Marjean Dorothy Wickham, C.C. Delasante
, and Robert Darcy through the downtown headquarters and New York FBI computer files. It was a pile of neat but useless paper.

  There was a long file on Darcy in the NYPD system. The printout did not contain the entries from the previous night’s failed arrest attempt. Bad Bobby’s name showed up in the FBI memory bank as well, but routinely—from the occasions when he had been a wanted felon believed to have crossed state lines to avoid arrest and prosecution.

  C.C. Delasante did not show up. A short-list of Delasantes appeared in the scan of the federal case–file directory. Cassidy had called up each one—a French general named Antoine Delasante, a New Orleans forger named Louis Delasante, an Iran-Contra witness named William Delasante, a Senate aide named Janet Delasante who had an Arab boyfriend, and a Pierre Delasante.

  Cassidy had not been able to call up Pierre Delasante. The federal computer had responded to his request with: L/A USG ST2 LVA FILE NOT AVAILABLE. It had said this the three times Cassidy had tried the name.

  There was a cross-reference in the directory listing: “Re: Molly Wickham, Re: Marjean Dorothy Wickham, Re: Jacques Delasante.” When Cassidy had tried these names, he had got: L/A USG ST2 LVA FILE NOT AVAILABLE.

  “What does this mean?” Lanham said to Sergeant Leander, the division’s chief computer technician.

  Leander was at his console, but eating a sandwich. A plastic cup of coffee sat dangerously near his computer keyboard. He glanced at the printout, and then up at Lanham.

  “What does what mean, Ray?”

  “L/A USG ST2 LVA FILE NOT AVAILABLE.”

  “It means ‘File not available.’”

  “You mean, there is a file but somebody’s using it?”

  Lanham was not being funny but Leander smiled as though he was.

  “It means there is a file but we can’t get at it. ‘Limited access. U.S. government. Status two. Level A.’ It means it’s classified and you need a special code for access. High-level stuff.”

  “There’s a wall around it? An electronic wall?”

  “A mathematical wall. You’ve got to figure out the access code, or get it from somebody. It’s probably several codes. You’ve got to be status two, level A, just to know where to start.”

  Lanham stuck his hands in his pockets, staring at the linoleum floor. There were coffee stains all around Leander’s chair.

 

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