The Girl From Nowhere (11 page)

THIRTEEN

I called Langham
to let him know what was going on, leaving out the little detail that someone had taken a pot shot at me. He knew from Schindler the lawyer that Sandy had been released, and was upset that Sandy hadn’t returned to his loving care—hadn’t even called him. I found that odd too. After he got that off his chest, he subjected me to a paternalistic lecture about responsibility. In return, I tried to winkle out more about his relationship with Sandy, but he wasn’t having any of it. Next I called Debereaux and told him about being shot at shortly after leaving his house. He expressed shock and disbelief. It was as if his words had been crafted for him by a speechwriter.

After that I watched a local news show, with the sound turned low. Following a story about a Vietnam hero from Yonkers being laid to rest and a segment about some kid getting busted for having an American flag sewn to the seat of his jeans, there was a tease about “a film industry figure” having been found dead in an Upper West Side apartment. After the commercial break and some clips of drunken revelers celebrating the Mets’ victory, came the short item about “an apparent suicide” in an apartment near Lincoln Center. The victim was identified as Paul Drexler, and a police spokesman said that he was believed to have been formerly employed as an assistant director in the movie industry in the New York metropolitan area. In other words an out-of-work
schlemiel
with a subscription to
Variety
. Probably the cops, with more time to search than I had, found his wallet and got their information from its contents.

Once again, I felt exhausted. Age was creeping up on me. A couple more years and I’d be one of those people over thirty-five you couldn’t trust with a joss stick. I fell asleep on the sofa.

When I woke, Sandy was standing there, looking down at me, wearing only her underpants and the sweatshirt she had had on that morning. She had made herself a drink.

“Put some clothes on,” I told her.

She looked hurt, but retrieved one of my bathrobes and slipped into it.

“It’s awful,” she said. “That guy in the apartment. You saw him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah—I saw him. You don’t want to know the details.”

“The police already told me more than I want to know.”

I was about to ask her if the cops had mentioned the name Paul Drexler, but she began to sob again. I grabbed her hand, pulled her down beside me on the sofa, and put a brotherly arm around her.

“Did you tell the police about the guy in the deli?”

“They asked me a lot of questions.”

“Did they give you a bad time?”

“There was a lawyer there—sent by Stew. He made sure I wasn’t bullied too much.”

The way she said “bullied” made me think that being bullied was something she might know something about.

“How long did they hold you?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Mister Schindler—that’s the attorney—told them I’d be available if they needed me, so they let me go.”

“And you came straight here?”

“This is where the police brought me.”

That was interesting. Maybe. The cops had picked her up at Langham’s, and it was Langham who had provided her with an attorney, yet they had brought her back to my pad. Should I read anything into that?

“They just left you here? Even though you didn’t have a key? They didn’t wait to see if anyone was home?”

“I told them I’d be okay. I’d had it with the police by then.” “And how come you didn’t call Langham?”

“Stew? I did try him—twice—from the pay phone on the corner. He wasn’t there, and he doesn’t have an answering service. He doesn’t believe in them.”

She had an explanation for everything.

“I called him for you,” I said.

She thanked me. I told her that I’d run into Langham and his daughter.

“Reina? She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

Nothing there. Sandy put her head on my shoulder.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

Luckily she didn’t seem to expect an answer. I attempted, for what felt like the millionth time, to put the pieces together, but it was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without having any idea of what the final picture should look like. Was it the Taj Mahal or only Asbury Park? Was I looking for fountains and minarets, or Tito’s Hot Dog Emporium?

About all that I knew for sure was that someone was trying to hurt or scare Sandy. Somebody had taken a shot at me from a moving vehicle, even though Sandy was not around at the time. Why, I wondered, just a single shot? If you wanted to be sure of hitting someone under those circumstances, you would normally squeeze off a few rounds. Maybe it had been intended as a warning, but how had the shooter known I would be there, unless someone had trailed me from Debereaux’s house? And how would he have known I was there in the first place? Had Debereaux tipped someone off? Intentionally or otherwise? Beyond these questions, there was a tangle of connections that didn’t offer any meaningful information. Sami Mendelssohn was Yari’s mother, whose boyfriend was Debereaux, who knew Stewart Langham, who had been a friend of Sami’s husband, who had been an associate of mobsters like Joey Garofolo, who was the employer of Sandy Smollett, whose head was beguilingly cushioned on my shoulder. That was even before I started cross-referencing and adding in the cops and the suicide, not to mention the maniac who had attacked us in the deli.

I was preparing, once again, to ask Sandy if the name Paul Drexler meant anything to her when the phone rang. It was Joey Garofolo. He wanted to know if Sandy was there, and asked to speak to her. I handed her the phone. I heard her say, “No—I’m okay . . . They didn’t give me a hard time . . . Stew sent a lawyer—Rupert Schindler . . . Yes, he handled things, thank you . . . Don’t worry about me . . .”

Then she told me her boss wanted to talk to me.

“Thanks for looking after Sandy, Mister Novalis,” said Garofolo, who was unexpectedly well-spoken. “I think it’s time you and I became acquainted. There’s a car on its way over to pick you up.”

“I’m not leaving Sandy here alone,” I told him.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Sandy’s safety is more important to me than you can imagine. Along with the car, I’ll also be sending a couple of boys who will be stationed discreetly near your building to make sure there’s no trouble. Let me speak to Sandy again so I can explain the situation to her.”

After she hung up, I asked her, “So how did Garofolo know you were here? How did he know I would be here?”

She bit her lip.

“When I couldn’t reach you, I gave him a call. The same time I tried Stew . . .”

That was a reasonable answer. I suppose.

Two limos in a day was a record for me. Debereaux’s had been a Caddy. This one was a Mercedes—which didn’t matter a damn, but some vestige of adolescent wheel worship caused me to take note. Debereaux’s driver had worn livery. Garofolo’s guy showed up in one of those shiny Italian suits with pants so tight they threaten to strangulate the wearer’s gonads. For all I knew, they were a form of contraception designed to circumvent the latest papal bull. Ray-Bans, of course. Except for the fact that someone had sawn off most of his nose, probably without benefit of anesthesia, he could have been taken for one of those Israeli guys who drive you to the airport.

Traffic was light by now and we made it to 42nd Street in less time than it takes to hold up a 7-Eleven. The limo dropped me outside Aladdin’s Alibi, which was identified by a discreet neon sign, a striped awning, and a muscle-bound bouncer passing himself off as a stand-in for Yul Brynner in
The King and I.
He waved me inside, and in the tentlike lobby I was met by a shrewd-looking woman with an Audrey Hepburn haircut. She introduced herself as Shirley Squilacci.

“Joey will be with you shortly,” she said. “He’s sorry to keep you waiting, but something came up. He says you should enjoy the show.”

She led me through double doors—decorated with life-size cut-out silhouettes of well-endowed lovelies—into an auditorium, and to a table near the stage. It featured a painted backdrop representing a seldom-visited oasis somewhere south of the Atlas Mountains, probably appropriated from a label found on a package of Medjool dates. This was not the golden age of grind. Burlesque had been buried somewhere in Hudson County, New Jersey; pole dancing had not yet graduated from redneck tent shows; and lap dancing was a few years away from being recognized as an authentic form of conceptual art. You could go to Vegas for over-decorated floor shows, and Paris offered extravaganzas like the Crazy Horse, but above all else this was the era of topless go-go dancing. For some reason, it was considered more titillating when performed on a table or a bar counter, or best of all in a cage hanging from the ceiling of some converted chop suey joint filled with flashing strobe lights. If you fancied coked-up bimbos in spangled bikini bottoms with gold tassels glued to their nipples, you could find them in practically any corner bar—and probably at church socials in some parts of town.

If you were looking for aesthetic stripping with a little tease appended, you had to search harder. The art of disrobing to the accompaniment of stilted syncopation and lecherous rim-shots had survived, but was confined to either seedy backroom dives where getting your pockets picked was part of the service or flashier establishments that aped the conventions of 1940s nightclubs as seen in B movies. There was a cluster of the gaudier sort within a block or two of 42nd Street and, by the thickness of a gold lamé G-string, Aladdin’s Alibi was the gaudiest. The decor was casbah-themed, and seating was in leatherette-upholstered booths and at jammed-together tables just big enough to support a couple of martini glasses and meager sandwiches priced like Tiffany bracelets. The place was packed with conventioneers in rayon suits, college boys seeking further education, and the odd couple from White Plains hoping to rekindle a dying flame.

Shirley signaled to a bored-looking waitress costumed as a belly dancer, who brought me a drink and favored me with a languid once-over. On stage was a stocky blonde who went by the
nom de plaisir
of Betty Boobs. The name was well chosen, given the amplified contours of her breasts, which had been sculpturally enhanced with synthetic polymers. She took it all off rather unsentimentally to an instrumental version of “The Dock of the Bay” performed by a saxophone-led quartet. My table was so close to the footlights, I could smell the talcum powder on her buttocks. The thought of Sandy Smollett up there on that stage was appalling.

Betty Boobs doffed her G-string and vacated the stage under cover of the ritual blackout, to be replaced by a pockmarked little troll in Baghdad bloomers and a Shriners’ tarboosh
who announced the imminent arrival of Ivana Bendova—“the concupiscent Kremlin cutie who set the Cold War on fire”—then launched into a barrage of leering obscenities.

“Here’s a question for you ladies out there—if men jack off, do you
Jill
off?”

It was a relief when the waitress returned with the news that Mr. Garofolo could see me. She led me out to the lobby, and then Shirley Squilacci took over. She accompanied me upstairs to a landing, where she knocked on a door marked
PRIVATE
. The voice I’d heard on the phone about forty minutes earlier called out “Come,” and La Squilacci opened the door and announced me to a man who was seated behind a moderne-looking desk that I guessed had been imported from someplace like Milan, Italy, as opposed to Milan, Ohio—the birthplace of Thomas Edison.

Joey Garofolo stood to greet me. He was not tall, but he had presence. About forty, with neatly trimmed hair and light brown eyes, he was in shirtsleeves but wore a conservative necktie figured with fleurs-de-lys that suggested there was a Brooks Brothers jacket on a hanger somewhere nearby. As he stepped from behind his desk to shake hands, I couldn’t help but notice that he had on the kind of handmade shoes that look as if they should be on a plinth in the Metropolitan Museum. People who have those special passports with extra pages for all the customs and immigration stamps they accumulate bring shoes like these back from Europe and say off-handedly, “Nice, aren’t they? I had them made at a little place near the duomo.”