The Girl From Nowhere (8 page)

“Any description?”

“Denim jacket, long, light-colored hair, maybe a ponytail. That’s about it.”

That was interesting. The guy from the White Horse?

“So,” I said, not wanting to put more of a scare into Sandy, “a simple case of a botched burglary?”

“Maybe,” said Campbell. “Maybe not. ”

“Because a guy who fits that general description was sitting on the stoop earlier this evening.”

“Anyone you recognized?”

“I’d seen him a few minutes earlier, on the terrace of the White Horse. Never saw him before that.”

Campbell shrugged. Sandy looked nervous.

The usual rigmarole of making statements followed. I told Campbell’s partner where we had been that evening, and explained that Sandy had slept over the night before.

“On the sofa,” she added.

The cop said it looked like a very comfortable sofa. He addressed a few questions to her, then told her she was free to leave. Sandy said she planned to stay. We spent another half hour waiting for the fuzz to finish. Before they left, I asked Campbell what unit he was working out of these days. He told me he was assigned to the Special Affairs Bureau, a euphemistic moniker for an outfit used to investigate incidents with the potential to embarrass someone in the establishment, or the Department. Garden variety break-ins do not normally come under its purview.

“So what brings Special Affairs dicks to my door?” I asked.

“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said.

“Are we safe here?” Sandy asked, when they had gone.

I told her I hoped so, adding, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be back tonight after the cops turned the place over.”

“Is someone out to hurt you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “In my business, you make enemies.”

“Is there anyone who might be upset about something right now?”

“Only Janice.”

That raised a smile.

“Seriously. Are you working on a case where somebody wants to get even with you? Or was that somebody after me?”

“The subway stalker?”

“He fits your description.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was probably just a botched break-in.”

“What about the gun?”

“
Maybe
a gun. What the guy in the kitchens saw was probably the crowbar used to force the door.”

“You’re hiding something,” said Sandy.

It struck me that there might be some value in letting her believe that.

“You say you can’t tell me about your past,” I told her. “I can’t tell you about my investigations.”

“So,” she said, suddenly smiling and eloquent, “your world has to stay secret from me, and mine has to stay secret from you—and yet here we are together, two people who seem to like each other a bit. It’s kind of sexy, isn’t it? You don’t have to answer that, because I already know how you feel. When we were dancing, you had a hard-on. Don’t pretend you didn’t because I could feel it. I hope I’m not being too forward?”

She bit her lip.

“It certainly is putting it on the line,” I said.

“Well, I had a hard-on for you too,” she said.

“A hard-on for me? Is that how nice girls talk where you come from?”

“Not the nice girls, no, but back then I wasn’t one of the nice girls. I’m still learning to be one. Sometimes I slip up.”

Okay. I thought about the warnings I’d been given to treat Sandy with kid gloves. I told myself to cool it, then went to the kitchen. I felt in the back of the top drawer, hoping that Campbell and his pal hadn’t cleaned me out. To my relief, I found my stash and a package of Zig-Zag papers.

“What are you doing?” Sandy called out. “I’m lonely.”

“I’m rolling a joint,” I said.

“Not now,” she said. “I need you here.”

I finished rolling the joint, lit it, and brought it to the living area. I discovered, with mixed feelings, that Sandy had removed her dress and was standing there in her underwear.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Just because. Yes—I do find you very sexy, but this is not the right time. There are bad things happening out there.”

“But we’re in here. Can’t we forget about all that? We’re on a date.”

“Sandy, we’re not on a date. We’re hanging out together for a reason—and I’ll grant you, we’ve been having a pretty nice time—but we’re here because those bad things are happening and we’re trying to figure out why.”

I thought some more about those warnings from Yari and from J.H. Lucking, but she looked as if she might burst into tears. She bit her lip in earnest, so that it bled. What could I do? I stashed the joint, put my arms around her, and tried to comfort her.

“Well, at least I should get a proper kiss on our first date,” she said.

Perhaps she was trying to entrap me and send me to my doom, but would one kiss make any difference? I intended a brief nibble, but it didn’t pan out that way. Maybe it was the taste of blood from her punctured lip.

“I’m getting another hard-on,” Sandy said. She took hold of my wrist and placed my hand on her crotch so that my middle finger rested on the crevice of her labia through the fabric of her underwear. The hard-on was metaphorical, but everything else was definitely for real.

“Do you feel it?” she asked.

I told her I felt it, and struggled to regain my resolve.

“Good—because that’s all for tonight,” she said. She allowed my hand to remain where it was for another second or two, then gently removed it. The tantalizing and lascivious smile that had settled on her face did not jibe
with the persona of a woman who’d seen
The Sound of Music
twenty-seven times.

I was getting to know a lot of different Sandy Smolletts. Too many.

NINE

Sandy slept in
the bed and I slept on the sofa, or at least
I tried. Sometimes when you’re half awake—and maybe a little stoned—your mind seems crystal clear and you zoom in on a single idea that takes on an overwhelming significance. It’s like gazing into a souvenir snow globe after all the snow has settled and finally the Empire State Building stands serene and magnificent among the drifts. As I lay there, eyes closed, my legs cramping because the sofa was three inches too short, the idea that came into focus was that a visit to Sandy’s Lincoln Center sublet was imperative.

When, after about four hours’ sleep, I suggested that to her, she gave me a look that was both angry and scared.

“What’s the point? What would you find there? I took most of my belongings to Jilly’s, and the rest are at the Alibi—where they’ll be expecting me in a few hours.”

Her reaction made me all the more determined.

“Call in sick,” I told her.

“That’s not the way I operate,” she said.

I let it drop for the moment and concentrated on the idea of paying a visit to the sublet, though I had no idea what I would be looking for when I got there. Then again, I had no idea what I was looking for, period.

Sandy agreed to the plan under protest. I was out of coffee, so while she got dressed I went to La Bonbonnière to pick up breakfast and to use the pay phone there to call Yari Mendelssohn’s number. I didn’t expect him to be there, since I knew he must still be in Haiti, but I was interested in finding out if there was some way of getting hold of him. I wasn’t even sure quite what I wanted to ask him, but that hunch I’d been cultivating told me that he knew more about Sandy than he had been letting on. I could have called from home, but I didn’t want her to know I was trying to reach him.

Yari had a live-in housekeeper who told me politely, in a lilting Caribbean accent, that Yari was out of town. I asked if there was a number where he could be reached. She said, “Lord, no—he’s in a godforsaken place with no telephones.” I asked when he would be back. She told me she didn’t know exactly and that I should contact his studio, though she didn’t think anybody was there. No one was.

I took coffee and sandwiches back to the apartment. Sandy visibly cheered up when she unwrapped a kaiser roll dripping with egg yolk and with tongues of crispy bacon protruding from the bun as if they wanted to lick her all over—an ambition I shared.

“You read my mind,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with sneakers—still the girl next door, but in a way that would permit her to blend in with New York a little more readily. When we finished eating, I said, “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

She was still fighting the idea.

“Do we really have to go? I could give you the key and tell you how to get in.”

I was beginning to wonder if there was some reason she didn’t want me to see the place.

“I’m not expecting to find anything,” I bullshitted, “but when you’re investigating something you have to check out every possibility, and you should be with me.”

“Don’t you have something else you should be doing?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be working on a case or something?”

“Right now,” I said, “you have my whole attention.”

Her mood this morning was utterly different from the night before. She appeared preoccupied, and at times her mind seemed to be a thousand miles away—in Paris, maybe, or wherever it was that Nowhere was. When we left the house, however, she was jolted back to the here and now.

I was on the lookout for possible trouble, but didn’t pay much attention to the man walking a dog who was approaching from the direction of the river. He was a wiry character with a big handlebar moustache, wearing aviator glasses with mirrored lenses, and dressed in a bondage biker outfit—tight black leather shirt and britches, black leather cap, biker boots, a black leather belt with loops for fake bullets, and wristbands with rows of studs. In other neighborhoods he might have stood out; in mine he was just another neighbor walking his pooch, a Doberman smartly got up in a studded collar that matched the wristbands.

As they drew alongside the stoop, Sandy stepped onto the sidewalk and the dog lunged at her, teeth bared. She backed up against the railings. The bondage biker tightened up on the leash so that the animal couldn’t reach Sandy. Not quite. I confronted him—without getting too close, because I didn’t fancy tooth marks on my ass—screaming something original about keeping his fucking animal under control. He sneered and said, “I guess Warlock doesn’t like your girlfriend.” We exchanged a few more pleasantries, then I noticed that Sandy was crouched on the sidewalk scratching the belly of the Doberman, which had rolled over and was whimpering with pleasure. With a few well-chosen curses, the deflated biker dragged Warlock away.

“I grew up with big dogs,” Sandy said, very matter-of-fact.

“I’m not saying he wanted to hurt you,” I said, “but that guy for sure wanted to scare you.”

Sandy shrugged.

“No big deal,” she said. “You’re reading too much into the whole thing.”

We took an express train to Columbus Circle. When we emerged onto Broadway, Sandy said once more, “Do we really have to go up there? The place gives me the creeps.”

I ignored her.

The sublet was across from Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. I asked Sandy how she had found the place.

“I’m renting it from one of the girls at the Alibi. I never met her. Her name’s Wanda Lee—an Asian girl—Asian-American. She’s touring over there now—Hong Kong or somewhere. That’s why the apartment was available. Strippers do a lot of these tours. Audiences want to see fresh faces. Well, I guess not only faces. A lot of girls go to Asia these days—I don’t know where, because I haven’t been—places where the boys fighting in Vietnam go for
R
-and-
R
. But it’s tough over there, because the local girls work for less money and they’ll do stuff American girls would never dream of.”

“You mean like the nice girls from the Alibi?”

That annoyed Sandy.

“Have you ever met any of them?”

“Only you—and I kind of figured you weren’t typical.”

“Well, you shouldn’t say nasty things about people you don’t know.”

I backed off.

“So tell me about the apartment,” I said. “She had it posted on a notice board or something?”

“No—it was all arranged before I arrived in New York. A woman at the Alibi set it up—the lady who looks after the girls—Shirley Squilacci.”

We arrived outside the building. It was a well-maintained older structure a dozen stories high with a modest entrance and no doorman but an elaborate security system that required two keys and a punched-in code to gain entry. It made me wonder how a stranger had managed to get into the building, let alone into the sublet, while Sandy was sleeping there. Maybe a resident of the building.

Sandy let us in, fumbling with the keys.

“You picked up the keys from this Shirley woman?” I asked.

“Shirley’s very nice. She knew I was new to the city and she brought me over and showed me where everything was.”

“She knew her way around the place?”

“I think she knows Wanda pretty well.”

“More than just friends?”

Sandy shrugged.

“It’s not unusual around places like the Alibi,” she said.

“Not your scene?” I asked.

She nodded, which could have meant yes or no.

The elevator arrived and we rode to the fourth floor. Sandy unlocked another door, which gave access to an apartment that faced onto an alley at the rear of the building.

“I don’t want to go in,” she said.

“We’re here now,” I told her.

“Too many bad memories,” she said. “Bad vibes. You look around if you like. I’ll wait out here.”

I stepped into a living room that was furnished like a cross between a motel on the outskirts of Newark Airport and a fortune teller’s parlor in Chinatown. The basic items—a sofa, an easy chair, a sideboard, a small table, a couple of upright chairs—were strictly boondocks bargain basement. There was a big console TV, though, and some bread had been laid out for bamboo-patterned drapes, there was a half-decent Chinese rug on the floor, and the place was packed with Asian tchotchkes
—
vases, figurines of courtesans
en déshabillé
and old men with fishing rods, a carved ivory pagoda, a bowl decorated with dragons and butterflies, a lacquered folding screen, a doll in some kind of traditional costume. On the walls were framed reproductions of Chinese landscape paintings, and draped over the sofa were lengths of fabric decorated with stylized blossoms and leaves. It was hard to picture Sandy Smollett living in that room.

The door to what I presumed was the bedroom was closed, which seemed odd. People seldom close a door when they go from one room to another, unless some issue of privacy is involved. I took out a pair of the cotton gloves I carry with me when I’m on a gig and pulled them on before grasping the handle and slowly opening the door.

It wasn’t pretty. A man was hanging by a length of nylon rope from a light fixture. A chinoiserie chair that he’d kicked out from under him was overturned on the floor a few feet away. His face was contorted and his tongue was swollen and protruding. He was a youngish white male, tall and of average build, with longish dirty-blond hair worn in a ponytail. Rigor mortis had set in, but there were no outward signs of decomposition. The faint odor suggesting the onset of internal decay might have existed only in my imagination. The corpse was naked except for a New York Knicks T-shirt and a pair of athletic socks. The man’s penis was frozen in a parody of priapic zeal and had turned a particularly nasty shade of puce.

I recognized him despite the twisted features. It was the guy who had been staring at me on the terrace of The White Horse the previous evening, and who had been sitting on my stoop a few minutes later. Possibly it was the same person who had tried to break into my apartment, and it was plausibly the man who had sneaked into Sandy’s sublet days earlier while she was sleeping.

My first concern was to make sure that she did not walk in on this macabre sight. I hurried back to the corridor, but Sandy was nowhere to be seen. In a way this was a relief, but it also set off all kinds of alarms in my head. Why had she left? Had she come into the apartment and seen the dangling man over my shoulder? That didn’t seem likely—surely she would have screamed or given away her presence somehow? Or was there any possibility she could have known what I would find in there? It would explain her reluctance to visit the apartment, but it seemed extremely unlikely. This man was not long dead. Sandy must have been with me when he died, though it was just remotely possible that she could have received a phone call—possibly even from the suicide victim himself—while I was at La Bonbonnière.

There was a stronger chance that she had seen something—or sensed something—and had gone to raise the alarm, though I could not imagine why she would have done that without telling me. It was possible too that she had taken off as soon as I entered the apartment because she was afraid that I would find
something
that she did not want me to see, not necessarily something to do with a dead man. Whatever the case, I had to move quickly. Trying not to retch, I hurried back into the bedroom to do a quick reconnoiter. I had spotted that there was a photograph on the carpet near the dead man, its face turned to the floor. When I picked it up, I saw it was a print of Yari’s
Vamp
picture of Sandy Smollett—sprawled in that leather chair, revealing enough flesh to provoke arousal—presumably the one Yari had sent her. Then I noticed, half hidden by the toppled chair, a pair of flesh-colored panties. When I checked them, I saw they were stained with what appeared to be semen. A nearby underwear drawer was open. I wasted a couple of seconds hoping that the panties belonged to Wanda Lee.

There was a pair of jeans and a denim jacket on the bed, and I quickly searched them, without luck, for a wallet or some form of ID. There was no time to check out anything more, but I did spot that the room’s only window was an inch or so ajar. There was a fire escape directly outside.

I left in a hurry without disturbing anything, checked that there was no one in the corridor, then made for the emergency stairs. I reached the street without encountering a soul. My first thought was to get as far away from there as possible, but then I changed my mind and walked as casually as I could manage to a little sandwich shop on a corner half a block away. I ordered a coffee and sat at a table by the window. If Sandy Smollett had raised the alarm, the apartment building would soon be crawling with heat. I heard a police siren, but the Doppler shift told me that the vehicle was headed uptown on Broadway.

I sat there for perhaps fifteen minutes, using the time to think about why Sandy Smollett had run out on me, and where she might have gone. There were any number of possible answers to both those questions, but my hunch—now spreading in all directions like a metastasizing cancer—led me to suspect that she might well have taken refuge at Stewart Langham’s studio, which was just a few blocks away. The sandwich shop had a phone, so I called information for Langham’s number. It was unlisted. I tried Jilly’s to see if I could get his number from her. No reply. I walked to Langham’s building and asked the doorman if a young lady had been there within the past half hour, looking for Mr. Langham. He said it was the building’s policy not to divulge information about residents or their visitors. I showed him my PI card and a twenty-dollar bill. He showed me the door.