The Girl From Nowhere (6 page)

SEVEN

I called Sandy
Smollett from the station and asked why
she hadn’t told me that she knew I was going to Stewart Langham’s studio.

“I didn’t want to spoil things for you,” she said.

That blew my mind.

“Excuse me, but how would that have spoiled things?”

“Oh, I would have told you how beautiful his place is, and then you wouldn’t have had the pleasure of finding out for yourself.”

“How come you called him anyway?”

“Stew? I call him sometimes. He’s such a sweet old guy, isn’t he?”

“And what about the fact that Yari Mendelssohn took that photograph of you right there in Langham’s studio? Were you trying to warn him that I’d seen that picture?”

“Of course not! What are you trying to suggest?”

She sounded angry and scared at the same time.

“So what was that bullshit you gave me about the picture being taken at some big house on Long Island?”

“I didn’t think it was any business of yours, and I still don’t. What’s it to you, anyway?” she demanded. “What are you getting so uptight about?”

I didn’t see the point of a slanging match. I mean, what did it matter to me? But I had no intention of forgetting about these apparent coincidences, or the deception that went along with them. Miss Smollett was going to take some watching.

“I’ll be down there with your things,” I said.

“You may not find me here,” she said, slamming down the receiver.

One thing that was spooking me about this whole situation was that there were too many people involved who had mob connections, however tenuous. I don’t mess with the mob. They play rough. The world’s cutest stripper, now holed up at my house, collected her paycheck from a mobster with a reputation for slicing people’s faces open. The photographer who had shot her for a magazine spread was the son of an attorney who had acted as a mouthpiece for big-time hoods. And now one of the grand old men of American art had informed me that he had been hanging out with wise guys for half a century. My résumé says I’m supposed to hunt down myopic geeks who paint fake van Goghs, not play high-stakes boccie with made men who eat spaghetti with their backs to the wall and pack .45s when they get their sideburns trimmed.

As for Langham, I didn’t know what to make of him, but it seemed clear that he was a candidate for having passed on information about Sandy sleeping over at my house. She could have called him the moment I left the apartment that morning. She could have given him my number, which meant that he could have called her when he knew I was coming over. Or she could have called Joey Garofolo—or God knows who else? Then again, somebody could have followed her from the club to the diner. There were any number of possibilities, and quite a few of them made it difficult for me to believe that Miss Smollett was being entirely straight with me.

A train squealed to a halt, the doors slid open, and I found myself in a car full of drunks celebrating the Mets victory in game four. I guess it had been wrapped by the time I spoke to Sandy. What was I going to do with this girl? What about those lies? And what did it mean when I said I was going to look out for her? Protect her? I hadn’t really given much thought to what that implied. Were we just going to hole up in my apartment? My apartment wasn’t exactly bulletproof or bombproof or proof against maniacs dressed as Santa Claus who might come down the chimney. As the train pulled into my station, it hit me that keeping Sandy Smollett under wraps was the wrong way to go. Getting her out into the open might make something happen. If she was still around when I got back to my apartment.

She was there, and acting as if nothing had happened. She had even tidied the place up.

“Did you see any of the game?” she asked. “It was thrilling.”

“No—I guess I thought you knew I had distractions.”

“Your ex-wife was here,” she said. “She’s very nice. She watched a couple of innings with me, but she had to leave before the game was over to meet with her women’s consciousness–raising group.”

Janice had never in her life been known to watch a ballgame, and the consciousness-raising group was new to me.

“She left you a note,” said Sandy Smollett.

She handed me an envelope. In it was a folded sheet of paper with one word scrawled on it: Barbie.

“Did you girls talk?” I asked.

“She told me some stories about how come you two got divorced,” said Sandy Smollett. “You were a naughty boy.”

“Did she mention that she was a naughty girl?”

“No—but I had a feeling.”

There was that giggle again. It was irritating as hell, but it really turned me on.

“I thought we’d go out tonight,” I said. “Get a bite—maybe catch a movie.”

“You mean a date?” said Sandy Smollett. “I’d like that.”

The way she said “date” made me uncomfortable.

“I hope Jilly sent something pretty for me to wear,” she said. “I mean, I want to look nice for our first date.”

Was there any irony in that statement? I had no idea, and in a crazy way I hoped not. I had a flash of feeling her up in the back row of the Bijou and presenting her with my class ring. Except that I never had one. If you’ve been wondering why I’ve insisted on calling her by her full name so far, it’s because I didn’t dare think of her as just Sandy. Not only because Sandy is such a nowhere name—which, come to think of it, is where she said she was from. To call her Sandy would be a dangerous concession to intimacy. I wanted to keep her at a distance—more than ever after my visit to Stewart Langham—and using both names helped. Sort of.

She unzipped the skirt she was wearing—the one she had had on the night before—and said, “You’d better turn your back.”

She bit her lip and looked at me pointedly. This girl knew how to get under a man’s foreskin. I had to get out of there before I did something foolish. I told her to put herself together while I went to buy cigarettes. In fact, I walked to the White Horse, sat at an outside table, and ordered a beer. I tried not to think about Sandy Smollett, but my mind conjured up Yari Mendelssohn’s photograph, then Danny’s painting. I managed to replace that with an image of the girl in the white dress, but since that dress was spattered with blood, that wasn’t much better—because I wanted to help her out of it.

Paranoia came to my rescue. I got a buzz that a man wearing a denim jacket over a Knicks T-shirt, seated alone at another table, was staring at me, or at least looking my way too often for comfort. He was about my age, good-looking in a sullen kind of way, with blondish hair in a ponytail. He didn’t look like a goon or a gunman, but then what does a goon look like? And did I have any reason to suppose that my well-being was under threat? Sandy Smollett was the one someone wanted to eviscerate, not me, though that might have changed in the last few hours. I looked at the guy again and comforted myself with the thought that this was the West Village after all, and the guy sipping his Rheingold might just have been thinking about hitting on me. I was pretty dishy in those days.

I took my beer inside and finished it there. When I set out for home, the man in the denim jacket was no longer on the terrace, but when I got to 12th Street, he was seated on my stoop smoking a cigarette. He didn’t budge as I climbed the steps but said “Hi” as I brushed by. From inside the apartment I saw him get up from the stoop and stroll casually toward Abingdon Square.

I didn’t mention any of this to Sandy Smollett, but I wondered if there was a possible connection to the other stalker, the one who had flashed her on the subway. She was waiting for me, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and she looked about ready to knock back some lime rickeys at the corner drugstore. What she had on now was a gingham pinafore dress with a flared skirt, worn over a crisp white shirt—though better to call it a blouse because it was too damn girly to be a shirt. Or perhaps she just made it look that way. The dress might have been the one she wore when she posed for Stewart Langham. It summoned up onanistic memories of my misspent early adolescence, and it was at that moment that I gave in and started thinking of her as just plain Sandy. I tried to remind myself that this girl had lied to me and was hiding who knows what from me, but it didn’t help.

I had been planning to take her to Max’s Kansas City, my regular hangout, but there was no way I could show up there with her in that outfit. Not unless I passed her off as a drag queen, in which case some Candy Darling wannabe hoping to be asked to sit at the Warhol table would try to scratch her eyes out. I decided we’d go to The Blue Mill instead. That was a mistake. The Blue Mill was a quiet West Village bistro, but the problem with neighborhood bistros is that you’re likely to run into the neighbors. Or worse.

It was Sandy who spotted her first.

“Look,” she said excitedly, “it’s Janice.”

And so it was—my lovely ex, dining with what I had to presume were members of her women’s group—Alice Comstock, Rita McSorley, Debbie Gold, Victoria Schlesinger, and a butch chick I’d never seen before looking at the world askance through begonia-colored Ray-Bans. Sandy strode right over and pecked Janice on the cheek.

“Lovely to see you again so soon,” said Sandy.

“Yeah—lovely,” said Janice, without conviction.

The other women gaped at Sandy in wonderment, stared at me with the kind of pity that’s born of a raised consciousness, then looked back at Sandy again in disbelief. With a big smile, she introduced herself to everybody, offering her hand—which was duly clasped, if mostly rather limply. Everyone muttered “Hi” and Sandy responded with “Pleased to meet you.”

I wanted to grab a table near the bar, but Sandy asked if we could sit in the one booth that was vacant. It would be much too close to Janice’s table for my comfort, but there was no way out of it. The Blue Mill was the kind of place where you could hear people’s conversations halfway across the room, but Janice’s coven had been stunned into silence—either that or they were all ears and hoping to snag juicy tidbits. Doubtless Sandy had been a fruitful topic of discussion at their meeting. The only saving grace in the situation was that they had been divvying up the tab when we arrived, so presumably were on their way out.

“I love this place,” said Sandy.

“It’s an old favorite,” I replied.

“Did you used to come here with Janice?” she asked.

I nodded.

“That’s so sweet,” she said. “So this is almost a kind of a reunion. I really love this place. It has atmosphere. It reminds me of my favorite Paris restaurant—La Tourelle. Do you know it?”

The only time I’d been to Paris was on my honeymoon. A disaster. Janice and I had a flaming fight on the terrace of Les Deux Magots, where she had insisted on going because she was expecting to clap eyes on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and possibly bum a light from the Great Man’s Gauloise
.
I don’t recall what the fight was about, but it was loud. An elderly Yankee lady with jeweled glasses dangling around her neck on a gold chain had sashayed over to our table, slapped me across the face with the international edition of
The Herald Tribune
, and drawled through her dentures, “It’s gutter scum like you who give America a bad name.”