SoHo Sins (13 page)

“You have a good eye for these rags,” I told her. It was not an empty compliment.

“I know. I’m going to be a model when I grow up.”

“That’s a noble aspiration.”

“My mom doesn’t think so. She says it’s a horrid idea.”

“Does she?”

“ ‘Horrid’—that’s her word. Why can’t she talk like regular people?”

“Well, she’s British, you know. English is her second language.”

Melissa giggled.

“But if you become a model you’ll have creepy boys looking at you all the time.”

“That’s OK. When you’re really beautiful, you can make them do whatever you want.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me. I watch TV.”

“Do you have your whole career planned out?”

“No, first I have to get really beautiful. I’m very pretty now, so that’s a good start. In about five years, I’ll be like a major babe. I’m already way cuter than my mom.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“Why not? It’s true. Anybody can see it.”

“Sometimes, Missy, being kind is more important than telling the truth.”

“That’s the way old people think.”

“Apparently so.”

“Anyway, I just have to get a little bit hotter each year. It won’t be too hard.”

“Then what?”

“Then whatever I want.”

Our walk took us past the corner building where the Olivers had lived. I tried to distract Melissa by pointing out several gold and silver necklaces and a Gucci handbag in a shop window on the ground floor across the street, a choice boutique with about six dresses on a rack and a jewelry counter to one side near the door. But my efforts were to no avail. The girl had her own agenda.

“Let’s go up,” she said. “There must be a really humongous blood stain and stuff.”

“It wouldn’t be good for your digestion.”

I steered Melissa quickly past the Prince Street entrance. “Besides, I don’t have the keys with me now.”

“I do.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not silly; you’re silly. Daddy gave me a whole set for when I came to visit on weekends.”

I swore to myself with annoyance. My tenants are prone to dispensing extra keys like party favors—to friends, drivers, relatives, lovers. Luxury renters all want to be secure, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in the least. Some have even been known to make spare copies for delivery boys from Gourmet Garage. It drives Don crazy. He saw to it that the elevator keys for the Prince Street building are hard to match and that each is clearly stamped “Do Not Duplicate.” You can imagine how long that slowed up someone like Philip Oliver.

Forgoing a lecture, I took Melissa away from the murder scene to my gallery, where she was happy to surf the Internet while I made a few calls.

“Did you hear what Tom Cruise did last night?” she asked. “How do you spell Rwanda?”

When Laura returned from lunch, she stuck her head in the back office to say hello. The young visitor made her scowl quickly, until Laura remembered to be patronizing and nice.

“Whose little girl are you?” she asked.

“My daddy’s. Two days a week.”

“Her mother is Angela Oliver,” I explained. “I’m her godfather.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Melissa seemed suddenly puzzled.

“Do you know what that word means?” I asked her.

“It has ‘god’ in it. So I guess it means you’re like a daddy, only you won’t ever go away.”

“Don’t be too hard on your father. He’s doing his best. Have you seen what’s happening to him now?”

“Uh-huh, he’s crazy. Everybody knows that. Mom says he has a degenerate brain.”

Laura bit her lip.

“It’s called a degenerative brain disease,” I told Melissa.

“I know, but Mom likes to say it the other way.”

Moving near the girl, I bent down to have a better look at her face. “When you’re alone together, just the two of you, does your daddy ever act, you know, not crazy anymore? Is he ever just himself? Normal?”

Melissa sighed. “Who can tell? My friends and I talk about our flaky parents all the time. My one friend, Julie, her folks aren’t even divorced, but her dad is stranger than anybody. Sometimes, he tries on Julie’s mom’s clothes, but they’re way too small.”

Shaking her head, Melissa looked at me with a serious, knit-brow expression. “Grown-ups are all kind of messed up in one way or another, don’t you think?”

Laura smiled broadly, guiltily, and excused herself to get back to work.

Sitting down on the black leather couch, I asked Missy if she knew what had happened between her parents long ago.

“Daddy loved Mandy more than he did Mom and me. So he left.”

“It’s not that simple. Your daddy loves you very much. He told me.”

“He told me, too. But he still went away. When you really love somebody you don’t go away. You want to be with them all the time. Nobody makes you. You just want to.”

“Sometimes it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you love two people at once.”

“Then you have to choose.”

I got up and went to the coffee maker and poured myself half a cup. Steam rose off the dark surface, and I watched the wisps twist and dissipate before I turned back to Missy.

“You’re right,” I said. “It took me a few extra years to figure that one out.”

“Why? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

“It’s a common mistake about me. Stick around and you’ll get over it fast.”

Melissa wiggled herself off the chair and traipsed over to stand near my side.

“You’re funny,” she said.

“I’m glad you think so, sweetheart. Funny is much harder than smart.”

“That’s because you have to be smart first to be funny.”

“How did you get so clever?” I said.

“Practice. My mom asks loads of questions, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like if daddy ever talks about other ladies, besides Aunt Mandy and Claudia.”

“We’re all curious about that.”

She scowled at me.

“Sorry.” I sipped the hot coffee. “It’s terrible for you to be in the middle of all this at your age.”

“I’m not so young. I’m almost a teenager.”

“Really?”

“In five and a half weeks, I’ll be twelve. It’s practically the same thing.”

“I see. Guess times have changed since I was in the sixth grade.”

“Seventh, next fall.”

A steady click of heels announced Laura’s return. She carried some loan forms for me and a paper cup of hot chocolate for Melissa.

“How quaint,” I smiled. “Here we are, just like a little family.”

“In your dreams,” Laura said. “I just figured you were probably being a bad host.” She looked around disapprovingly. “I’m going to need this room in about fifteen minutes. Our favorite German client is coming in.”

I winked at Melissa. “Let’s go, sweets, money rules. We don’t want to impede the forward march of art history, do we?”

Laura strode away down the hall, each step sounding like the clink of gold coins dropping into a sack. She was wearing four-inch spike heels and a cropped black skirt. I knew she must be about to close a deal. Laura’s legs have sold more art than half the galleries in SoHo.

I went back to the desk and called Angela on her cell phone to let her know where to find us. Her taxi pulled up to the gallery a few minutes later. I walked Melissa to the Greene Street entrance and watched her cross the few steps of sidewalk toward the open door of the cab, the sun bright on her red-and-white togs.

From inside the yellow sedan, Angela waved and called, “Thanks so much, Jack.”

As I headed toward the back of the gallery again, I saw Laura peering at me from behind the reception counter. She shook her head slowly.

“Very touching,” she said.

“You’re not exactly the maternal type, are you, Laura?”

“Me? No. I’ve always thought of children as nature’s way of telling you to stop having sex.” She held up a sheet of slides and picked two. “I’m not ready for that yet. How about you?”

“I’ve never known what I’m ready for.”

Turning, I glanced out again through the glass door and saw Melissa, safely strapped in, gaze back at me for a lingering moment. When our eyes met, she stuck out her tongue. Then abruptly, as the sunlight flared once on her blond hair, the taxi lurched forward and was gone.

“Come on, Jack,” Hogan said the next day over a drink at MercBar. “Help me out.”

We were sitting in a corner near the room divider made of woven deer antlers. The dark space, lit by a glowing kayak suspended over the bar, was packed with lounge cruisers having their first drinks and plotting their night. I remembered the place fondly, from my own predatory times.

“Use your annual junket, just this once,” Hogan prodded, “for something other than just harvesting money and getting laid.”

“Why,” I asked, “should I take financial advice from a guy whose annual income wouldn’t pay my dry cleaning bills?”

“Yeah, laugh. But if I were you, buddy, if I had no scruples detectable to the naked eye, I’d take this chance to do some good.”

“Like how?”

“Like finding out all you can about this dreamboat Paul Morse. What do you know?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “He performs once in a while in rat-hole galleries and warehouse spaces—in Dumbo or wherever. He shoots video constantly. Some of the footage he airs on late-night cable TV. No one really likes him. Girls think he’s hot.”

“And not liking him doesn’t put them off?”

“Not in the short run, which is probably all Morse cares about.”

“That’s a break for him. Especially given the local consensus. Everyone I talked to at Amanda’s memorial said he’s a slimeball.”

“You can’t please everyone.”

“Seems like you’d have to go some, though, to earn a sleazy reputation in this SoHo crowd of yours. You’d have to work pretty hard.”

“Unless it comes naturally.”

“Anyway, it’s your call. Just ask around on your travels this summer. Or would you rather see Philip go down for murder?”

Hogan knew the answer to that. We finished our drinks and wished each other luck.

Little did I guess that the key to the case, the whole fatal charade, would come to me in Switzerland—from my own dear gallery director. I might have known. Nothing happens in the art world that Laura doesn’t hear about quickly. Women trust her, and men just want to keep talking to stay in her presence.

The second week of June, we went to do the Basel art fair. Laura, arriving first, oversaw the installation of our booth—a double space in a premium center-aisle spot—while I trailed by a couple days. My first night in town, we attended a reception and then had dinner with some dismal European collectors. Afterwards, Laura and I adjourned, alone, to a cocktail lounge.

I looked around at the plush seating groups and the knee-high little tables, each with a candle encased in red glass. Behind the bar was a mirrored wall lined with shelves holding a hierarchy of bottles. The barman was washing glasses, wiping each slowly with a white cotton cloth. I felt oddly at home. It was one of those nameless lounges in one of those placeless hotels. A Michael Bolton tune played on the sound system, mercifully subdued. I had to remind myself what country we were in—not that it mattered much really.

“What do you know about Amanda’s boyfriend?” I asked.

“Paul Morse? Just enough to be disgusted.”

“Why’s that?”

“He wears those awful three-quarters-length pants. And a baseball cap, backwards.”

“Anything more serious?”

“Ask your Icelandic artist friend, the one with the cute little daughter.”

“The Viking? Don’t tell me Paul acted funny with his little girl.”

“All I saw was a grown man flirting with a child.” Laura paused. “Nauseating.”

“Maybe they were just kidding around.”

“Your Viking didn’t think so. Paul was making a video of his Madison Square Park project. Little Anna got a big part in it.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“It’s the way Paul treated her. Like the whole thing was a date. Fortunately, the Viking is a good father—in his big awkward way. He stayed close. If things had gone any further, I don’t think Paul Morse would still be so pretty.”

As I listened, something stirred in me like a sickness taking hold. I thought of a day years ago, when I went with Philip to pick up his daughter from a play date in Washington Square Park. Melissa was with a schoolmate, watching some Jamaican acrobats perform in the dry circular basin of the fountain, when she spied Philip and came tearing toward him.

“Daddy, Daddy, can my friend Cindy stay over tonight? She’s like really cool and she’ll bring some Disney tapes with her and it’d be super fun. I promise I’ll do my homework first.”

“Oh, all right, princess,” her father said. “If you promise.”

The girl was in his arms before the reply was half finished, kissing his neck—and peeking over his shoulder to say a polite “Hi, Uncle Jack.”

Philip had no choice, of course. Melissa owned him more certainly, more completely, than he owned Oliver Technologies.

“Go, kumquat,” he said. “Go get Cindy and Emmanuelle.”

The girl squealed and ran back toward the fountain, swerving around skateboarders and NYU kids with guitars, goths in chain-draped black jeans, and gay hunks with single earrings and bright pocket handkerchiefs advertising their preferences—top or bottom, water sports or S&M.

“Adorable girl,” I said. “You breed well.”

“She’s my great hope.”

When Melissa started in our direction again, she and Cindy were holding Emmanuelle’s hands. The French nanny, about nineteen and dressed in sultry disarray, made a small sensation as she passed through the crowd.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Philip said.

“What, Emmanuelle’s wardrobe?”

“No, what girls do to your head. Until they’re a certain age, all you can think about is how you want to protect them, save them from everything bad in the world. But suddenly they change, they start to grow into women, and then all you can think about—if you’re not related by blood—is how you want to screw them stupid.”

“Is that why you hired Emmanuelle?”

“No,” he said, “I hired her because she’s extremely good at her work and speaks wonderful French, which Melissa desperately wants to learn. The two are crazy about each other.”