The Chelsea Girl Murders (19 page)

“Happened?” I said.

“It started spontaneously attracting them, and they just kept coming, and then it attracted the late Mr. Bard, Stanley's father, and his partners, all art lovers. Some people believe it is built on a peculiar energy field or sacred burial ground.”

Between bites of her food and parsimonious sips of her manhattan, Edna told more stories of the Chelsea. George Kleinsinger the composer had had an alligator he walked in the hallway. When Arthur Miller lived here, he narrowly missed running into Joltin' Joe DiMaggio in the Quijote bar one night. They were both post-Marilyn at the time. Andy Warhol made a movie called
Chelsea Girls
here and practically lived here, he visited his friends here so often. Bob Dylan had a baby here and wrote the song, “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” at the Chelsea. Clifford Irving was arrested here after the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax. Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were “just kids. Utterly helpless and dependent on each other and on heroin, may they rest in peace.” Leonard Cohen wrote a song called “Chelsea Hotel #2” for Janis Joplin here. There were stories about less-famous tenants too, a girl who had run off with Tony Bennett's piano player, an heiress who lived here, fell in love with one of the bellmen, and married him. Brendan Behan had been fished out of the drunk tank by his publisher and brought here to finish a book. He wrote two and conceived a baby here.

After a bit more to drink and eat, she got downright gossipy.

“Barry Coman, the actor, he's moving back into the hotel. His girlfriend got him off heroin!” she said. “The professor on eight? Fred. He's seeing a married woman, one of his students. They fell in love in the High German love lyrics class he teaches, and they've been doing it like Apaches ever since.”

Maggie smiled. “That's not Fred. That's Gunther, the German professor on four.”

“Oh, right you are, Maggie,” Edna said, clicking her tongue. To me, she said, “You'll like it here.”

“Oh, I'm not staying long I don't think,” I said. I shot Maggie a look. We'd schmoozed Edna, most enjoyably, for a while, and she had a few manhattans in her belly. When would we get to the real purpose of our meeting?

“Tell us what you know about the murder,” Maggie said.

“Just between us Chelsea girls, right? Doesn't leave here.”

“Right,” Maggie said. To me she said, “Code of the Chelsea—we talk among ourselves, but we don't spill to outsiders unless we have to.”

“Grace Rouse called me the day Gerald was killed, wanted to know who was the woman Gerald was coming to visit. Was it you, Maggie, or someone else? She thought I might have heard something through the grapevine. I told her—”

“Your secrets die with you.”

“Right you are. Grace sounded very agitated. More than agitated. Crazy.”

“I met Rouse,” I said. “My gut instinct was that she didn't kill Gerald.”

“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.

T
HE 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 Twenty-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.”