The Chelsea Girl Murders (7 page)

“A chocolate chunk muffin,” I said. “And coffee, light, please.”

He mumbled something and backed away from me.

The murder had happened late, and only one paper, the
News-Journal
, had the story in time to make its deadline. To my great relief, the
News-Journal
reported the body had fallen on “an unidentified tenant.” Thank you, June Fairchild, I thought. She'd kept my name out of it … for the moment.

“Who Shot Controversial Art Dealer?” The
News-Journal
asked. “Troubled art dealer Gerald Woznik was found dead in the notorious Chelsea Hotel last night. Police say he'd been shot in the back.”

It went on to say that in recent months, Woznik reportedly had had financial and personal troubles, and quoted Woznik's ex-wife, Naomi Wise Woznik, who issued a brief statement from the surrealist commune in Tuscany where she was living: “The world has lost a great art connoisseur and a real bastard.”

That word, “bastard,” came up a lot in quotes from “friends,” fellow art dealers, and artists who claimed the dead had ripped them off. Gerald Woznik was also “arrogant,” “manipulative,” and “a liar and a thief.”

Only heiress and art dealer Grace Rouse, the woman Woznik had been living with, defended him.

“He was a misunderstood genius,” she said.

My cell phone rang, startling the timid waiter and drawing looks from the short-order cook and the guy who looked like Timothy Leary. I felt like a traveler from the future, whipping out the phone in this anachronistic joint.

“Robin, it's June Fairchild,” said the caller. “I wanted you to know, one of your neighbors at the Chelsea had been watching through the peephole, and saw the man slam, bleeding, against the door, before you opened it.”

“Great, so I'm completely in the clear then.”

“You haven't been cleared officially, but I wouldn't worry. Richard Bigger won't officially clear you until they've arrested someone else. You know how he hates you, Robin.”

“Who was this neighbor? Was it the bodybuilder?” I asked, and described him. “He seems to spend a lot of time in the hallway.”

“He told us he didn't know anything. The neighbor who saw you was a man named Cleves, a tourist from San Diego. Didn't see the actual crime, didn't see anything else and was flying back west today. Robin, I'm beginning to believe you really do have a curse on your head,” she said, with her tony, uptown, Dalton School accent. June Fairchild of the NYPD was once known as “The Debutante Detective” because of her flawless social pedigree. I knew her from a previous unfortunate incident.

“What about the frizzy-haired brunette, Maggie Mason?”

“The police weren't able to interview her until this morning, but, she apparently has an alibi. She was on AOL in a comic-book chat at the time of the murder. I'll try to keep you informed, as much as I can, Robin, but I'm taking a few days off to look after my daughter. She's having her tonsils pulled. I have to go, Robin. I'll talk to you later.”

What a serene vacation it had been so far, I thought—an apartment building burns down and a dead man falls into my face. I was having dinner with Phil, from my old building, that evening. Phil's philosophy was not to complain about bad things that happen, they might just prevent something worse. I'd have to ask him what horrible event could possibly be prevented by these disasters to make them somehow justifiable in the cosmic scheme of things. It would have to be a pretty bad event, like a sarin gas attack on the subway or a Pat Buchanan presidency.

chapter five

“The fire, it's a shame, luv, but who knows? If it hadn't happened, a week from now a gas pipe might have ruptured, blown up the building, and killed us all,” said Phil, lifting his big Thai beer in a salute to our good luck. We were sitting at a corner table at Regional Thai Taste, a restaurant on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street.

“Except you. Somehow, you'd survive,” I said.

Phil has survived an extraordinary number of disasters in his lifetime. This all began during World War Two, when Phil was a young British soldier in North Africa and the only survivor of an attack by Rommel. Since then, he'd pulled widows and babies out of fires, crawled out of the wreckage of plane crashes and ferry sinkings, and eluded a cobra that came up a Calcutta toilet. The stories he told about these things were really unbelievable—I thought he was completely full of crap until he showed me his scrapbook of news clippings about his various adventures. He didn't show it to me to be boastful, although he had a healthy ego and was not a falsely modest saint kind of guy. He showed it to me to prove he wasn't full of crap and to get me to buy into his wacky philosophical tricks.

Tricks like: When something inconvenient happens to you, something beyond your control, you have to try to look at it as maybe preventing something worse. This kind of washes out when facing famine, war, or epidemic disease, but it can really help with day-to-day coping. In my life, there seems to be no completely reliable law but Murphy's—whatever can go wrong will—and the idea that what goes wrong might in fact prevent something far more terrible is more reassuring than that old morose “things could be worse” digestive.

The first time Phil told me this little trick, he had just fixed my front door, which had jammed, locking me inside and making me late for a very important business meeting. “Robin, if you'd been able to get out sooner, you might have wandered into the path of a car or a killer,” he said at the time.

“You think this murder prevented something worse from happening, Phil?” I now asked. Phil chewed on his pad thai and washed it down with more beer before saying, “What's the quote you like from
Twelfth Night
?”

“‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.'”

“You never know what might have been averted. Everything in the universe is connected. Drink some of the beer and let's talk about something else. You haven't told me yet how your trip was.”

I took a swig and said, “It didn't go that well. It's hard traveling from country to country. Every country has new rules you have to memorize and follow or risk offending people. I don't know how you do it, Phil, with all the traveling you've done. On this patch of land, you can't eat pork. Jump over to this patch, you can't eat beef. Move sideways a half step and you're among people who don't eat any meat, who wear special shoes on their feet and screens over their mouths so they don't accidentally step on or swallow an insect. It's confusing.”

“Did you offend some people?”

“To put it mildly. Among other things, I brought a curse upon the heads of the five children of the Thai TV president, or some damn thing. I liked those kids too, Phil, we took to each other. Now, they all think they're cursed and I'm the big red-headed bogeyman who did it to them.”

“Every place has its own traditions, superstitions, etiquette.…”

“How do you manage to travel to all those refugee camps in all those places and not offend people without meaning to?” Phil spent part of each year volunteering in refugee camps.

“I do offend people. That can't be prevented. When I do, I apologize sincerely, explain my ignorance, and ask where that honorable tradition I've offended came from. That way I learn, and they see that I have no harmful intent.”

Phil was so smart. That was much better than bursting out laughing and saying, “You're kidding me,” for example.

“But sometimes people don't even know how something got started,” I said. “They do it because it's always been done that way, and everybody else is doing it too. And sometimes they don't tell you that you've offended them. They're too polite. You continue having what you think is a lovely time with them, and think all went well, until you get back to the office and there's an angry fax about your rudeness and lack of respect.”

“Not everyone takes offense so easily. Don't worry about the ones who do. They're a minority.” He took another swallow and said, “I have more bad news, I'm afraid. The building looks bad, luv, six apartments completely destroyed, including yours. There's smoke damage, water damage. But you've seen it, I suppose.”

“No, I haven't been back to the neighborhood yet. Not ready to face it.”

“It looks bad. The management company wants a couple of weeks to assess the damage, decide whether to restore the damaged building or tear it down and start over,” Phil said.

“Tear it down and start over? How long will that take?”

“Whatever they decide, it is going to take time. We're planning to have a tenants' meeting later this week or next, when we can get everyone together. Your brow is furrowing again. Drink some more beer. It's good for you,” he said, and smiled.

Phil had this theory that for every person who drinks too much in this world, there are two who don't drink nearly enough. As I drank, he filled me in on the news about our other neighbors. Sally was doing some three-day meditation thing that involved a vow of silence, so Phil hadn't spoken to her but to her chatty friend Delia instead. Reportedly, Sally was viewing the fire as a kind of cosmic purification, a message that it was time for a fresh start. Now she was meditating and waiting for a sign to point her to the next “phase.”

“Mr. O'Brien and his housekeeper are staying at a motel in Brighton Beach,” he said.

“Watching porno and taking advantage of his Viagra prescription?”

“Watching game shows and soaps and arguing. The Japanese film students have been squeezed into NYU dorms. Mr. Burpus is at the Y.”

“And Dulcinia Ramirez?”

“I saw her yesterday. She's fine,” he said.

“How is she enjoying convent life? I hope the nuns aren't too radical for her.”

“It's not one of those hip, modern-dress left-wing feminist convents,” he said. “It's the old-fashioned kind, on a wooded lot surrounded by high walls. The sisters wear traditional black-and-white penguin habits.”

“Mrs. R. must be happy out there with a lot of other old-fashioned, celibate women who love Jesus,” I said.

“She is ecstatic,” Phil said. “They pray a lot, they sing, they read from the New Testament, they bake cakes, they have different activities every night. Monday night is video night. Wednesday night is whist night. Saturday afternoons they go on an outing to a museum or a park. The nuns love Señor. One of them made him a little habit, and now they call him Sister Señor.”

“And the nuns love Mrs. Ramirez?”

“Well, Robin, they love her in that good, Christian way. Those nuns love everyone. There's a little friction there though. I can't put my finger on it, but it's there.”

“How do you know these nuns?”

“I did some handyman work for them, installed their security system and fixed the cistern. When I was in India, I rewired their mission. In return, they send me free cakes. They bake cakes, you know. Immaculate Confection …”

“Immaculate Confection? THOSE nuns?”

“Yes, you've heard of them?”

“I saw a report about them on ANNFN after they went public, or the bakery operation went public anyway. Those are great cakes. Piety and cake, it's Ramirez heaven. Think she'll stay on out there?”

“Oh, I think she may want to come back to the neighborhood when she can. She was quite concerned that, in her absence, crime was going to skyrocket because there'd be nobody to patrol and call in reports to the police the way she does.”

“Public urinators are probably running rampant.”

“Take another swallow,” Phil said. “She may be calling you too. I let it slip out you were at the Chelsea …”

“Oh, great.”

For years, Mrs. R. and I had been mortal enemies, on account of her thinking I was a transvestite-madam-drug dealer, and always trying to rap me with her cane. Once the misunderstanding cleared up, she decided we were friends, which was worse. She'd corner me, call me, follow me sometimes wanting to tell me about her ideas for TV shows, her conspiracy theories, to complain about her new favorite whipping boys, baby boomers, or just to show me the new electrified Ascension of Jesus display she'd bought for Easter.

“They're keeping her pretty busy out there,” he said. “I don't think she'll be bothering you much. I'll be visiting her again tomorrow. Want to send a message?”

“Just my fond regards.”

I turned to wave for our check, and saw the man in the bad toupee at a nearby table, talking into a telephone. Our eyes met for a moment, and then he looked away. He waved for his check too. I had to force myself to look away from the toupee. It was so bad it kept drawing my eye. By far, this was the worst toupee I'd ever seen in my life, and I've seen some bad ones, having once done a report on the shady side of the hairpiece industry and interviewed six bald guys with brain abscesses from a faulty hair-replacement system. But this wig took the cake and begged the obvious question: Why would anyone wear such a terrible and obvious toupee? Did he know how bad it looked? Of course, I was just assuming it was a toupee from the false look of it and the uncomfortable way it sat on his head. If it was his real hair, it was even more horrifying. It answered that age-old question: Can space monsters mate with earth women?

Phil had borrowed a car to come in from Jersey, and had parked it down Seventh Avenue near Twenty-first Street. I walked him back to it. Before he got in, I said, “What about you? Are you going to stick around, move back into the building if they rebuild?”

I'd waited until the last moment, not sure if I was going to ask at all, afraid I might hear an answer I didn't want.

“I don't know, luv,” he said. “Have to see what Helen wants to do. She's undecided.”

Like a little kid, I watched him as he drove off until I couldn't see the car anymore. I got this weird chill watching the car vanish into a blur of taillights—I don't know if it was déjà vu or
sera vu
, but it wasn't a good feeling. After it passed, I turned and walked back to the Chelsea.