JM03 - Red Cat (7 page)

Clare was still sprawled on the sofa, her bare feet propped on cushions. She’d read the Times and the Journal both, and now she was working her way through a thick biography of Andy Warhol that she’d produced from somewhere. She heard my sigh and looked at the scripts and at me.

“You going into show business now?” she asked. She stretched her legs and ran a small, pale foot across the top of the sofa.

“Isn’t everybody— for fifteen minutes, at least?”

“I figured you for the one holdout.”

She shut her big book and sat up and went to the window. A pair of gulls wheeled and swooped above a rooftop across the street, fighting over a scrap of something. Clare wrapped her arms across her chest and watched them.

“You buy a car yet?” she asked after a while.

“I’m still renting.”

“You want to rent one tomorrow— maybe drive someplace for the day?”

This was new. I took hold of my coffee mug. “Someplace like where?” I said slowly.

“Anywhere— I don’t care— someplace out of town. Someplace we won’t run into anybody, and we can walk around.”

I thought about it while Clare watched the gulls. “I’ve got some things to take care of, but if I can get through them today, then sure.”

Clare nodded, her back still to me. After a while, she pulled on her boots, picked up her coat, dropped a pair of dark glasses on her nose, kissed the corner of my mouth, and left.

* * *

Her perfume still hung in the air when I picked up the telephone. It was nearly one o’clock and I hadn’t heard back from Gene Werner yet, or from the other ex-Gimlets I’d left messages for. I tried Werner first, but didn’t even get the answering machine. I gave up after a dozen or so rings. I tried Kendall Fein, out in LA, with much the same result. I had better luck with Terry Greer. He still lived in the city and still acted in way-off-Broadway theater and, best of all, he was actually at home.

I put another couple of miles on my accident story and Greer was eager to talk. His voice was youthful and friendly, and though his story was nothing I hadn’t heard before— that he hadn’t kept in touch with any of the Gimlets; that, when he knew them, Holly and Gene were prickly and self-absorbed; that Holly’s plays were problematic, at best, but that she was a hell of an actress— he nonetheless turned out to be a little pot of gold. Greer had pictures.

“My girlfriend was just cleaning out that drawer last night. I was going to dump those old photos, but she put them in a box. They’re not great art or anything, just snapshots from when we all went for drinks after the last performance of Liars Club. That was the last thing we did together.”

“Snapshots are better than what I’ve got now,” I said.

“I guess so.” Greer chuckled. “Well, you can pick them up whenever— there’s usually somebody around.”

Pictures.

I called David’s cell and got his voicemail and, eventually, a call back. He was in a car, on the way to the airport and not alone. I heard a man’s voice nearby, my brother Ned’s. David listened silently while I told him about my trip to Brooklyn, my conversations with the former Gimlet Players, and Greer’s pictures. His voice was full of business and studied neutrality when he spoke.

“That all sounds reasonable,” he said. “I’m back Tuesday night; we can follow up on Wednesday.”

He hung up and I headed for the door.

* * *

Greer lived not far from me, in a beaten-up brownstone on West Twenty-second Street, off Tenth Avenue. His apartment was on the second floor and, to judge by the number of names on his mailbox, he shared it with at least three other people. Greer wasn’t in when I buzzed but, as promised, someone was. The roommate was a lanky, twentysomething guy with blond hair and a bad beard; he came to the apartment door in a Columbia sweatshirt and a cloud of reefer smoke. He gave me an envelope and a nod and he shut the door.

“Thanks,” I said to the empty hall.

I opened the envelope in the little lobby of Greer’s building. There were two photos in it. They were in color and they showed two men and three women around a scarred wooden table in a corner booth in a bar somewhere. There were beer bottles on the table, and a few empty highball glasses and a candle burning in a red hurricane lamp.

A pale woman sat at the edge of the group, on the right, looking beyond the camera and maybe beyond the walls of wherever they sat. Her hair was a heavy russet mane, swept back from an angular, icon’s face. Her nose was long and delicate above a broad, mournful mouth, and her eyes were shadowy smudges. She wore a black T-shirt that fit like paint and her breasts were round and full beneath it. One white forearm rested on the table.

Even poorly lit, she looked like Wren as David had described her to me. More arresting than I’d pictured, more frankly beautiful, but I was almost certain it was her. According to the note Terry Greer had scribbled on the back of the envelope, it was also Holly Cade.

* * *

“She’s just not that into him,” Clare said. She was sitting at my kitchen counter, sipping at a vodka tonic and looking at Terry Greer’s photographs. Late-afternoon light came through the windows and warmed the color of her hair. “He’s into her, but she could give a shit.”

I was mixing a cranberry juice and club soda and eating the cold sesame noodles Clare had brought back. “Who’s not into whom?” I asked.

“The redhead, and the guy sitting next to her.”

The guy, I knew from Greer’s note, was Gene Werner. He was dark-haired and ponytailed, clean-shaven except for a short, neat beard that covered his square chin. There was a rope braid around his wrist, a small gold ring in his left ear, and a handsome smile on his lips as he looked at Holly. I stirred my drink and swallowed some and picked up the photo.

“You think?”

“It’s in the body language,” Clare said, and she was right. Werner was turned toward Holly, one arm along the back of the booth, trying to encircle her, the other on the table, a barrier against the rest of the group. His eyes were fixed on Holly’s face and there was worry and uncertainty in his smile. Holly was leaning away from his hopeful arm, and her eyes were in another zip code.

Clare played with the lime wedge in her drink. “She must be used to the attention,” she said, “wanted or otherwise.”

“How so?”

“That whole Renaissance sex-kitten thing she’s got going— it’s hot.” I looked more closely at the photos, at Holly’s pale skin and slender fingers and wide, sad mouth. Clare had a point.

“You’re looking for her?” she said. I nodded. “What for?” I smiled and shook my head. Clare held up a hand. “Forget I asked.” She took another sip of her vodka tonic and opened her Warhol biography.

I carried my drink, the noodles, and the pictures to the table, where my laptop and notepad waited. My notes were nearly up to date: I’d covered my conversation with Greer, and the photographs, and I’d summarized all I’d learned about Holly Cade. It took a page and a half but as I reread it, I wondered if it was what David had in mind.

I want you to find this Wren, for chrissakes— to find out who she is and where she lives— to find out as much about her as she has about me.

I’d done well enough on the first two items, though I needed David’s ID to be certain; it was the third I had doubts about. Assuming Wren and Holly were one and the same, how much did I really know about her beyond her name and address? The strained family ties, the forays into writing and acting and video, and the decidedly mixed results, the striking looks and the self-absorption— what did they add up to? What had she been doing since the Gimlets had folded and her video show had gone nowhere? Who was Babyface, and who was he to her? Why was she trolling the web for a guy like David? And, having found him, what the hell did she want from him?

8

Clare and I drove to Orient Point on Saturday morning, at the far end of the North Fork of Long Island. It didn’t go well. We were back in the city before dinner and she didn’t take her coat off in my apartment. She disappeared into the bedroom and reappeared a moment later with her overnight bag on her shoulder. She paused on her way to the door, and her voice was more tired than angry.

“You know, you have a real knack for fucking up a good thing,” she said.

Her footsteps receded down the hallway and echoed in the stairwell. I shut the door and turned on the lights.

* * *

The Long Island Expressway had been ugly but empty that morning, and my head had been full of Holly Cade and David as I drove. Of Holly I knew only bits and pieces, not enough yet to understand— or even expect to understand— her actions. But David was a different story; he was my brother and I was supposed to know him. Or something like that.

I’d wondered about his serial infidelity, and wondered why. I thought about other cheating-husband cases I’d worked, and about the rationalizations I’d heard before: “I have needs”; “She doesn’t understand me”; “It’s just sex”; “It has nothing to do with her”; “Out of town doesn’t count”— all the usual suspects, and all so ordinary. It was hard to imagine David subscribing to any of them. Of course, it was hard to imagine him doing anything so dangerous— so potentially self-destructive— as these anonymous trysts either.

Clare had been mostly silent beside me, sometimes reading from her big book, sometimes fiddling with the radio, sometimes just watching through her dark glasses as the asphalt unfolded before us. But the farther behind the city fell, the more she seemed to lighten and uncoil, the more some tension I hadn’t known was there seemed to dissipate. By Glen Cove, she’d put her feet up on the dash; by Melville, she was singing softly with the radio.

We’d taken the LIE until it gave out in Riverhead, and then made our way onto Route 25. The landscape flattened around us and the pale, immaculate sky grew larger and brighter with light off the water. We’d passed wineries, and acre after acre of bare vines. They were gnarled and tough looking, and mustered in strict rows behind wire fencing. Clare took off her glasses and ran the window down, and a cold, marine wind rushed in.

We’d stopped for breakfast in Southold, at a tiny diner with a view of a harbor. It was filled with locals and the men had eyed Clare surreptitiously over their eggs and waffles. She’d eaten an omelet and stared at the buttoned-up boats rocking at anchor. I’d had pancakes and thought more about David.

A few of the errant husbands I’d tracked had offered a kind of diminished-capacity defense when they were caught in the act— a story about judgment impaired by the sudden rush of blood to points south of the belt buckle. As an excuse it had done them no good with wives or divorce court judges, but as an explanation it had a certain honesty. I wondered if that was David’s story. But he’d always been such a directed and self-disciplined bastard, and always so smug about it too. It was hard to picture him surrendering to impulse, or besotted with anyone.

I’d wondered if these encounters were an outlet for all that restraint, but ultimately didn’t believe it. There was something else going on. I remembered David telling me about his screening procedures, and how satisfied he’d been with his cleverness. “If she won’t play by my rules, I move on.” He liked pulling the strings.

We’d strolled around the harbor after breakfast, Clare wrapped in her black coat and dark glasses, and with a black Mets cap on her pale blond head. We’d walked to the end of a street, at the end of a hook of land, to a bench with a view of Shelter Island. We sat and watched a small ferry crawl across the water, and Clare leaned into me and put her hand into my pocket. After a while the wind picked up and chased us to the car and we drove farther east, to Greenport.

Route 25 became Front Street in Greenport, and met Main Street at the harbor. Both streets were lined with low clapboard buildings and they were more crowded than I’d expected on a midwinter day. People shopping, running errands, just walking, and they all seemed to know each other. We parked the car and got out. Clare took her hat off and ran a hand through her hair.

“It’s like frigging Bedford Falls or something,” she’d said, but she’d been laughing.

An antique store was just opening up, and she’d led me inside, and up and down the single crowded aisle. She smiled at the guy behind the counter and left without buying. Out on the sidewalk, she’d taken my arm again and we’d wandered up the street. My thoughts wandered back to my brother.

Power and control, ego and anger: beyond the rationalizations and lame excuses, most of the cheating husbands I’d tracked were driven, down deep, by one or more of these. But David had become a mystery to me since Monday, and harder to read than any of those guys had been. Constructing a secret world, laying down its rules and regulations, and watching people jump through his hoops— that was all about power and control; but what about the rest? Was David’s ego so fragile that he needed the attentions of strangers to shore it up? Or was it anger driving him, and if so, anger at what, or whom? Stephanie was one answer, but maybe not the only one. His marriage, his career, his reputation, even the reputation of Klein & Sons— David had put them all at risk.

We’d walked the shop streets until the shops had run out and Clare had gotten hungry. There was a hamburger stand at the bottom of Main Street that was open for lunch and she’d led me there and ordered something messy, with onions. I’d ordered the same and we found another bench by the water. Our burgers steamed in the cold air and a couple of gulls had stared at us hopefully.

We’d driven the last ten miles to Orient Point after lunch. We crossed the causeway and Route 25 became Main Road and ended at the ferry terminal and the state park. The park was open and we walked in. There was scrub oak and red cedar along the sandy path, patches of snow in their shadows and a white rime at the edge of the pond. Beyond the trees and the pond and the long brown grass were rough beach, gray water, and sky, and they were bare, bleak, and gorgeous. Clare took off her glasses and opened her coat and walked at the water’s edge. I thought about Holly and David and Stephanie as I watched her.

After a while Clare came back. Her face was pink and her hair was a tangle of gold. She leaned against me and put her mouth on mine. Her body was warm and firm and I could smell the ocean in her hair. “My hands are cold,” she said, and she put them inside my coat and under my shirt. We stayed that way until I spoke.