‘I couldn’t tell if you were breathing there for a second. You should be glad I checked. Look, when you went to the Virgin Islands with that decorator – ’
‘He was doing the backgrounds for the bathing suit number. You know that.’
‘With that decorator, you flew Pan Am. What other airlines go down there?’
‘From here?’ Dany tried to think through the bleariness of sleep. ‘Trans Caribbean, but only on Sundays.’
‘Thanks.’ He kissed her eyes closed and pushed her head back down on the pillow. She knew she wouldn’t be able to go to sleep again.
He found the number for Trans Caribbean and called. A voice that was a copy of the Pan Am girl’s spoke to him. He was disappointed – he’d hoped for some rich fluty West Indian tones – but he went through his Mr Baldwin routine enthusiastically. The girl paused at the same points as her Pan Am sister, but she went to check her records, too.
‘Hello? Mr Baldwin? I checked and we did have a reservation for a Miss Mueller. It was paid in advance as you said. But I don’t think your tour director should worry. Miss Mueller never boarded the plane; she didn’t check in at all. I’m afraid she was a “Stay Away,”as we call them here.’
‘Yes.’ Roman agreed and hung up. He guessed so, too.
‘Trouble?’ Dany asked. She was at the doorway, picking up the happy jacket with her toes rather than venture in front of the window even though the nearest possible peeping Tom was on the other side of the East River.
‘Not exactly. The trouble’s gone.’
‘Antiques?’
‘Yeah, antiques.’
He had a lost look that came over him very rarely. She crossed the room and pressed his head between her breasts. The maternal gesture revived Roman because it amused him. Maybe she would nurse her kids in public after all.
‘I think you should drop the antiques,’ Dany said, ‘and get into something interesting.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘Bugs?’ Captain Frank said. ‘You’re supposed to be getting this murder case out of the way, and you’re talking about bugs? I’ll tell you about bugs.’
He went past Sergeant Isadore to the door and locked it and came back to his desk.
‘I’ll tell you about bugs,’ he repeated. ‘Yesterday I came back here late and what did I find? A CID taping a mike in the men’s room, that’s what. And a plainclothes going through my wastebasket. That’s all. So don’t you tell me about bugs.’
Isadore pressed his lips together tightly. His round face took on the rigidity of a steel trap shut tight on a small animal. The animal was his tongue.
‘Zoologist! He’s been too sick to come in? Fine. Keep him away from here. You could have arrested that what’s-his-name. Instead you let him get into the warehouse and practically start an antique store. I bet they got a good laugh out of that at CID. Why not give all our suspects a chance to play with the evidence? They can take it out if they like, like a library.’
By the time Isadore got a chance to exit, his ears buzzing, he was happy not to hear about bugs either. He turned his anger on Grey. The Gypsy had broken his promise to help. When he got to his desk he found a note that someone called ‘Number One Son’ had called. If this son showed up, he’d arrest him too.
Isadore stared at the gray Formica top of his desk trying to get hold of himself. Coffee rings merged with cigarette burns which led like exclamations to the crumbs of the Danish he’d had for breakfast. He picked up a crumb on the tip of his finger and ate the evidence. He couldn’t arrest his son. As for Grey, he was only acting like a Gypsy. Why had Grey fooled around with the antiques? Was there evidence in the evidence? It was the sort of question that gained baking soda a permanent place in Isadore’s heartburn.
An hour later he was at the warehouse of the Astor Movers off Astor Place in the East Village. The friend whose place Buddy Locher had taken the day of the accident was there, having just delivered a van from Boston the day before. The warehouse was nothing more than a pair of truck bays between a used clothes emporium and a hat and felt goods manufacturer. Everything lay under a layer of dust as thick as gray velvet.
Isadore’s nerve broke. It was a bad day and a sour case and a man couldn’t be expected to do everything at the same time. He went to a corner newsstand and bought a pack of cigarettes. He lit up on the way to the warehouse. The first drag developed from an innocent experiment to a wicked, lung-stunning inhale. He walked into the empty bay.
‘Yeah. What is it?’ a man in a dirty mover’s uniform asked as he came down a ramp. The uniform stretched over equally beefy arms and stomach.
‘I want to – ’
‘Hey!’ the man said. He pointed at Isadore’s cigarette and then at a sign posted beside the bay. ‘Can’t you read?’
NO SMOKING IN THE VANS, IN THIS BUILDING OR ON THE JOB, the sign said.
‘Everyone’s a Surgeon General,’ Isadore muttered but he walked out to the street to step on the cigarette. He went back and explained in a deliberately calm fashion who he was and why he’d come.
‘You don’t want me,’ the mover said accusingly. ‘You want the kid.’ He went to a metal door, kicked it and yelled, ‘Hey, Hale. Get down here. Some cop wants to see you.’ Isadore resisted the impulse to ask whether garbage collecting was good training for moving works of art, but just barely.
‘The kid’ impressed Isadore more. His name was Howard Washington Hale. He wore his blond hair long but neatly trimmed, and his uniform was crisply white. He was even polite.
‘I knew Buddy in the service, but he was a little different,’ Hale reported. ‘Not dangerous, just nervous. He didn’t send me a letter to say he was coming to Boston, and I bet it was just because he was so relieved to muster out.’
‘How long have you been out?’
‘Six months. I wish I’d been there when Buddy got into town, but there was a party out of town and . . . you know. Don’t tell Mr Astor.’
Isadore’s jaw dropped. ‘There is a Mr Astor?’
‘Sure, you just talked to him.’
Isadore talked to Hale until the boss reappeared, slamming the door open with one butt of his stomach.
‘You still here?’ he yelled at Isadore. ‘I got a schedule to keep. This isn’t civil service.’
Hale shrugged his shoulders. ‘Any more questions?’
‘No, thanks.’
Hale got into the van. Somehow the kid kept it clean even in Astor’s warehouse. There was a plastic saint on the dashboard. Isadore remembered it had been among Locher’s effects. Astor threatened some cars in the street and waved the van out. Isadore watched it drive to Broadway and wait for the light.
‘What is it now?’ the mover asked Isadore with anguish.
‘Nothing. Thanks, you’ve been very cooperative, Mr Astor.’
Astor flared. ‘Okay, okay, so it used to be Astorini. You going to make something out of it? You and the FBI. You want to see my membership card in the underworld?’
Isadore picked a straight line to his car and tried to follow it. The line was intersected by a bum asking for a cigarette. Isadore handed over his whole pack.
He drove toward the end of Manhattan where the department tow truck dropped vehicles bound as evidence. A pair of young patrolmen were looking over the cars headed for public auction. They passed right over what now looked like a busted accordion but had at one time been an Eldorado. Isadore went to the small van that said LEASED TO ASTOR MOVING on the door. There was no top to the door; it had been sheared off with the top of the cab. He went through the interior for the third time. He didn’t expect to find anything he missed at the accident, but Grey’s accusations about picking on Gypsies annoyed him. Except for the marks of the collision, the van’s cab was spotless, and so was the rear where the antiques were carried. Isadore got out with a sense of absolution and walked to the Eldorado. He’d find a rich field there loaded with possibilities as soon as his expert showed up. His essential optimism was showing through.
Isadore beg
an groaning twenty feet from the Eldorado. He trotted over the damp cement, and by the time he was standing over the crumpled fender he was mentally pounding his breast. No zoologist would help anymore. The Eldorado’s body was, for some strange reason, as clean as the van’s.
‘Yeah,’ one of the attendants said when Isadore asked. ‘CID said to hose the place down. Said it was getting to be a health hazard.’
It made sense. The Detective Bureau used the lot much more than CID. He and the attendant got the hood open. He looked at the smashed honeycomb of the radiator. The bugs there were washed away, too.
The interior of the car was still dirty, but it had been checked thoroughly. All the contents down to tobacco and pieces of garbage had been sealed in cardboard boxes. The door hung open like a broken wing. The upholstery hardly existed. The lab had taken samples of all stains, and there hadn’t been much that wasn’t stained in Nanoosh Pulneshti’s car. The ashtrays were gone, along with much of the carpet. The dashboard was marked with inscrutable scratches. There was little left of the windshield Nanoosh had gone through. There was nothing left for him to find.
Almost nothing, he admitted. Dirt had collected under the brake pedal, and as a pathetic last note a fungus was growing in it. It reminded him unnecessarily of the humidity of the past few days. In the wreckage of death, life persisted. Isadore was not a callous man.
There was no point going to the driver’s side. The door there hadn’t opened since the accident. He angled over the floorboard to get a closer look at the fungus. It was a fringe of tiny mushrooms with thin stems and pointed caps. It was a new one on him, and he used to take his boy out mushroom hunting in the Catskills.
‘A pajarito,’ Lieutenant Ebert said. He held Isadore’s catch into the light with tweezers. The lab technicians had been as stymied as Isadore when he came in with his handkerchief wrapped in a bundle. Ebert was from Narcotics. ‘How about that? Where in the world did you get it?’
‘Then it’s not local?’
‘I’ll say it isn’t. You could sell a little treasure like that for five hundred dollars in the East Village. It’s from Mexico, the state of Oaxaca just west of Guatemala. The Mazoteca Indians grow some of the best hallucinogenic mushrooms in the world there, pajaritos, derumbes and big, fat Santo Jesucristas. First time I’ve seen one of these in the city.’
The Gypsies hadn’t been smuggling the stuff in, Isadore knew, because nothing else like it had been picked up after the accident. These pajaritos were just growing, smuggling themselves in.
‘What’s the germination period for these? I mean, how long would it take them to grow and how fast to die in New York?’
Ebert scratched the bristle that served as hair on his head. Being a ‘nark’ meant he had an active outdoor life and a tan that showed through his crew cut.
‘All depends. Fungus’s pretty basic stuff. It’ll pop up easy enough, but here, in New York, it should die pretty quick. Especially pajaritos. I’ve been down there with the immigration patrol. Cool, damp mountains in the Sierra Mazoteca. See’ – he held his hand out – ‘these are already dehydrating. So I’d say these could last, once they’ve started growing, four, five days.’
‘How long could they have been in the dirt before they started growing?’
‘Oh, I get you. Considering the change in climate, it would have to be real soon. Less than a week for that, I’d guess, but then nobody knows for sure. Like my friends on the street say, mushrooms are crazy things.’
Isadore returned to his desk and sat down with a pencil and pad, feeling a little bit like a girl on the rhythm method. If the pajaritos – ‘little birds,’ Ebert translated – were about four days old, tops, and the germinating stage was no more than a week, that put the Eldorado in the southern end of Mexico just eleven days ago. This was Friday. The accident had occurred four days before. Which gave Nanoosh Pulneshti less than a week to drive through Mexico and most of the United States. Gypsies were known to be exceptional drivers, but this was pushing it. A week hardly gave Pulneshti enough time to run over a dog, let alone commit, dismember and pack a murder.
He walked around the room. It was mostly empty, just a lieutenant in the corner learning to type. The rest were home having supper. Why wasn’t he? On a large corkboard were pictures of kids reported missing by their parents. A file below it held nothing but the names and descriptions of kids who had run away from home or just vanished. Kids who weren’t home for supper. He went through the file for the tenth time, picking out those who might bear some resemblance to the body in the bigger file at the morgue. Strict selection winnowed the number down to five.
A high school student from Roanoke, Virginia. A nurse from Brownsville, Texas. Another high school kid from Memphis. A dropout from Little Rock and a social worker from Wheeling, West Virginia. It had to be someone on the road from Mexico, that much he was sure of. If Pulneshti did it. And if Pulneshti didn’t do it, he knew less than when he started. The trouble was that Isadore was beginning to suspect that Grey really had learned something.
It took some cajoling, but Erskine Lippincoot of Lippincoot Frères had a weakness for working with the police. When Sergeant Isadore called him on Saturday morning, he took some pleasure in announcing to his weekend guests that he often assisted the authorities in matters dealing with antiques and that they would have to excuse him for a few hours. Duty called, and the Lippincoots had never vacillated in performing civic acts.
Isadore was waiting at the warehouse when Lippincoot arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. He wadded his gum into a ball and wrapped it in paper as Lippincoot revealed himself in a white twill summer suit and ascot. The two men had never met before, but they recognized each other without difficulty.
‘Perhaps you could explain this to me again,’ Lippincoot said as they entered the warehouse.
‘I’ll try,’ Isadore said. ‘We have some antiques here from an accident. One expert has, uh, already gone over them, but we can’t get his report. I’d appreciate it if, with your expertise, you could examine these pieces. Since you are acknowledged to be the top dealer in town and you’ve been kind enough in the past, we thought you’d help. You see, if you don’t find anything, then I’ll know that the other man didn’t find anything.’
‘Odd,’ Lippincoot said, presenting a formidable row of wrinkled brows. ‘Who is this other man? I’m sure I’d know the name.’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t tell you.’
‘Very odd.’
‘It’s just to relieve my mind.’
Lippincoot’s brows met and rebounded. He’d come all the way from Sag Harbor to relieve some sergeant’s mind.
‘Here they are,’ Isadore said.
Lippincoot’s irritation subsided under the pleasure he always took in fine antiques. Mentally he classified each piece and dismissed the policeman. The tragedy – and masterpiece – of the set, of course, was the highboy, reconstructed so artfully as to almost hide the fact that it was beyond repair.
‘Marvelous work, really marvelous. The owner came down to put it back together?’ It wasn’t the sort of work a police carpenter was capable of.
‘No. The other expert. In about an hour,’ Isadore said. He couldn’t help wondering how long it would have taken Erskine Lippincoot.
‘Hardly likely.’ Lippincoot opened a drawer gently. The expressive brows rose further. ‘That’s odd. Why did he do that?’
‘What’s odd? Did what?’
‘The fellow scratched the inside of the drawers, that’s all. It’s something you might do to authenticate a piece, not put it together. I use a little silver knife for that sort of thing myself.’
‘On purpose, he did it on purpose?’
‘Of course. The man who put this antique together wasn’t about to stumble through it. Pine’s very soft, and he probably could have managed with any sharp object. I remember, it was during the war, we were in France, and I had nothing but a nail file . . .’
‘Pull them out. All the drawers.
’
‘Oh, no,’ Lippincoot protested. ‘This is dried walnut that’s two hundred years old. Very brittle and just held together with epoxy. It could fall apart if we began manhandling it.’
‘Pull them out,’ Isadore ordered in the tone of voice he used on rookies. Somewhere in that circumference of fat was a steel core, Lippincoot realized, and he obediently pulled the drawers out one by one and laid them on the floor.
‘Odd.’
Understatement was starting to wear on Isadore, but he inquired politely what provoked the remark.
‘You cut to see if wormholes are genuine,’ Lippincoot informed him. ‘These are. They’re regular capillaries, wormholes, and that’s where you run into some of your troubles with refinishing. Sucks moisture in, thus. And there’s a definite residue in some of these. Recent I’d even say, though it’s hardly noticeable.’
‘Residue of what?’
‘Oh, blood, of course. I am an expert, you know.’
Lippincoot was unwavering in his opinion. Asked whether there was any evidence in the drawers of dry ice, the dealer said just the warping in the joins.
‘An insurance agent checked it?’ he wanted to know. ‘That doesn’t mean anything if the man’s late for lunch or something. You don’t look for smuggling in a Chippendale chest, you know, just to see if someone had knocked a hole in the side. You can’t place too much in what insurance agents say, you see. As a group, they’re very . . .’
‘Odd,’ Isadore supplied.
There were a round dozen girls missing from the New England area, Isadore discovered when he got back to the office. Half of them were suspected of skipping off to cut cane in Cuba. Four others for color of hair, build or easily identified marks were disqualified. That left a private school teacher from Middlebury, Connecticut, and a librarian from Boston. There were no fingerprints on either that he could match with the corpse. It took an extra day, but he had Middlebury and Boston get hold of the girls’ dentists and check out the dental profile. By Sunday afternoon he knew the corpse to be one Judith Jean Mueller.
Gypsy in Amber Page 8
