I walked past the old Sotheby’s/Parke-Bernet building and noticed that there was activity across the street at Galleries St. Briac, apparently the opening of an exhibition—a “vernissage,” as establishments like St. Briac preferred to describe such events. I’m the kind of guy who can’t walk past a frame shop without stopping to look at the crappy seascapes in the window, so I crossed over to see what the fuss was about. Galleries St. Briac specialized in American and European art of the early modern era. The show being previewed was devoted to work by representatives of New York’s Ashcan School—always popular with the well-heeled. In the window, there was an extravagantly framed John Sloan painting of newsboys freezing their nuts off in the snow. Beyond that, I could see the usual crowd one encounters at such openings—men who get their nails buffed at hotel barber shops, women who think it chic to trail their furs behind them like lionesses dragging the carcasses of wildebeest back to their lairs. Some of them had come from as far as a dozen blocks away.
I wasn’t planning to join the fray, but then I saw Stewart Langham with an attractive young woman—not Sandy—on his arm. Not surprising he was there. St. Briac probably had a selection of his paintings in its inventory, so it was a place for Langham to rub shoulders with collectors and potential collectors, as well as social cronies.
He spotted me as I entered and did nothing to discourage me from coming over, though he said something to his companion, who moved off toward a tray of canapés.
“Mister Novalis,” he said. “Is this part of your usual beat?”
“I saw you through the window and thought I’d say hello.”
“You happened to be passing?” he said.
“Pure chance,” I told him. “I had a meeting with Jack Debereaux and thought I’d work up an appetite before dinner.”
I wanted to see if he had any reaction to the name. His face didn’t register more than a flicker of curiosity, but he said, “Why don’t we step outside?”
First though, he introduced me to the woman he had been with. She was not as young as she had looked through the window—probably in her early thirties—and was quite beautiful in a classic kind of way, with straight blonde hair and blue-gray eyes. There was about her something of the same “untouched” look that Sandy possessed, at least when inhabiting one of her personas.
“This is my daughter, Reina,” he said. “She has her mother’s looks. Reina, this is Mister Novalis. He’s a friend of Sandy’s. If you’ll excuse us for a moment, we have something to discuss.”
Reina favored me with a nice enough smile, then her father and I headed for the sidewalk, where Langham produced a pack of Dunhills, offering me one.
“You’ll be wondering about Sandy,” he said.
“I stopped by your building this morning,” I told him.
“I’m aware of that,” he replied. “The doorman informed me—at least, I assumed from his description it was you. You were correct in presuming that my studio was where Sandy would seek sanctuary. It proved temporary, however. It seems that somebody killed himself in her apartment, which inevitably attracted the attention of the police—but perhaps you already know about that? From what Sandy told me, that seems likely. You must have discovered the body, I fancy, though the officers who came to my studio said that the discovery had been made by a cleaning woman who comes twice a week and has a key.”
I asked him if he knew where Sandy was.
“The police took her away for questioning. They didn’t tell me where.”
“Did you get the officers’ names?”
“I have them written down somewhere. One of them fancied himself as a bit of a character. Smoked a pipe until I asked him not to.”
“That would be Detective Campbell.”
“Merely a detective? I would have hoped for an inspector, or at least a sergeant.”
“Rank is about passing exams. Sometimes a plainclothes man with hands-on experience has more clout than somebody sitting behind a desk with stripes on his arm.”
“Is that so? In any case, they took Sandy away. I called an attorney for her. Rupert Schindler.”
I knew Schindler by reputation. He had been a tough prosecutor who now worked the other side of the fence, where the grass is a lot greener.
“What time did they take her?” I asked.
“Several hours ago.”
“I had a visit from Campbell and his sidekick too,” I told him. “They asked questions about Sandy but didn’t say anything about having picked her up. Nor did they bring up anything about the suicide. I hope you didn’t mention to them anything about me maybe having discovered the dead guy?”
“I saw no reason to.”
I thanked him.
“All I can tell you,” he continued, “is that I would be at home now, waiting for Sandy’s call, but I had to come to the gallery because I’d arranged to meet my daughter here. She was arriving in town by train and I had no way of getting in touch with her to make a new plan. She got here a few minutes ago. We’ll be going back to the studio shortly.”
“When Sandy calls,” I said, “assuming she does, please ask her to get in touch with me.”
“I’m not so sure she’ll want to do that.”
“You don’t think she trusts me?”
“On the contrary. She says she doesn’t want to get you into trouble.”
“Please,” I said, “tell her to call.”
“I’m not sure that I’m prepared to do that,” he said, “because, despite Sandy’s apparent trust, I don’t know what your intentions are. I don’t have any idea of what you might be mixed up in.”
“My intentions are to help her,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word for that. And what I’m mixed up in? I wish I knew, but I have a suspicion that Sandy is the key to finding out. Now, can I have your number in case I need it?”
He hesitated, but gave me his card. He then returned to the gallery to find his daughter and I continued on my way. Could I trust Langham? I had no idea. I turned my thoughts to Sandy. Where had they taken her? The Special Affairs Bureau most likely. That was somewhere in midtown. I’d never had any reason to visit. How long would they hold her? No way of knowing, but—given everything I knew and suspected—it could be a long time. There was no crime to charge her with that I knew of, but like me they saw her as the conduit to something of interest. And when they released her, where would she go? Back to Langham’s? That seemed possible, but based on what I knew about Sandy—which didn’t amount to a hill of garbanzos—it was foolish to even make a guess.
I was walking past the half-assed bunker in which the Whitney Museum had been rehoused a couple of years previously, wasting my time with foolish guesses, when I heard what I took to be a backfire. I quickly realized that something had hit the museum’s granite facade, just a couple of feet from where I was standing. Simultaneously, a Volvo station wagon took off down the street like a Sidewinder missile. It took me a second or two to get over the indignity of having been shot at from a station wagon, and a European one at that, but I recovered my wits enough to scram before the shooters came back, possibly in a Peugeot. The only witness was a lady in a mink wrap walking her Yorkie, and she was convinced that the dog had been the intended target. I scuttled west, pretending to be invisible, until I reached the IRT station at 77th Street. I rode down to Union Square, went to my office, and checked my mail and messages. Bill collectors and then a familiar voice. Sandy’s. Three calls.
“Where are you?” the final one began. “I’ve been waiting on your front steps and it was freezing, so now I’m in a bar—I’m not sure where, but not far from your apartment—and guys are hitting on me, and I’m waiting for a burger, and I wish you’d come and rescue me.”
I tracked her down in the little tavern at the corner of West 4th and Jane, which was packed. She didn’t look too unhappy perched on a bar stool, noshing the last fries off
her plate, surrounded by half a dozen guys who were taking the evening off from writing the Great American Novel. When she saw me she jumped down from the stool, rushed over, planted a kiss on my nose, and said, “Take me home, please.”
Home?
She then said good-byes to all her admirers, and we left.
“You look pretty spry,” I said, “for somebody who’s just been interrogated by the police about a guy who killed himself in your apartment.”
She burst into tears. Not just your everyday blubbering—blind, helpless, heart-wrenching sobs. I had never encountered anything quite like it, and had no idea what to do. It was as if she was trying to purge herself of a lifetime of misery. I tried to comfort her, but she rejected every attempt to touch her. Passersby stared at me with hatred, and one woman told me that men like me should be castrated and strung up from the nearest lamppost. After a couple of minutes of this, Sandy threw up in the gutter—an unappetizing gumbo of ground beef, ketchup, and undigested fries.
I offered her a handkerchief. She thanked me, then she grabbed my arm like the survivor of a shipwreck clutching a spar for dear life.
“Let’s go home,” she said again.
I put an arm around her and half-walked, half-carried her to my house. She stumbled onto the stoop and I left her there for a moment while I unlocked the front door, and then the door to the apartment. When I returned, she seemed to be on the verge of passing out. I picked her up and carried her inside and to the bed. She asked me to take off her sneakers and jeans, which I did. Then I covered her with a blanket. A minute later she was asleep.
I was pouring myself a drink when the doorbell rang. I checked the stoop through the window. It was Janice—famous for her bad sense of timing. I opened the door and told her politely to fuck off.
“Oh, and which sex kitten did you buy the kitty litter for tonight?” she asked.
I slammed the door in her face.
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.”
The Girl From Nowhere Page 10
