Slugfest db-4

by Rosemary Harris

  “Is this a private slumber party or can anyone join in?”

  Forty-nine

  Lucy Cavanaugh put the kibosh on pizza from Carmine’s, Chinese takeout, or Thai food, claiming all of the above were loaded with carbs that would expand in her stomach like rising dough and render her new white jeans permanently unwearable. She was given to hyperbole. In the end we settled on the Silver Moon diner, which had something for everyone, even J. C., who thought it a sign of moral turpitude for single women to order in, believing we should either cook wonderful meals for ourselves or go out. On this she was firm. Clearly both women had issues with food; Jamal and I were less picky.

  Lucy brought her suitcase upstairs, then came back down in yoga pants and mukluks, drying her long hair, which was still wet from the rain. Three of us jumped as the downstairs buzzer shrieked, announcing our food had arrived, and Lucy jokingly asked if we were expecting to be raided.

  “They don’t usually ring the doorbell in a raid, dear. Generally, they just knock down the door,” J. C. said, as if she knew. By now nothing J. C. did or said surprised me, but it was apparent Lucy hadn’t spent much time getting to know her neighbor.

  “Go out of town for a few days and all sorts of interesting stuff happens.”

  * * *

  “So,” Lucy said, “let me get this straight. The cops think Jamal here bashed in some guy’s head—maybe two guys—and you’re looking for a warm place for him to sleep tonight. The dead guy’s girlfriend was here and takes off down the fire escape, and you think she’s one of the bad guys because she knocked down a plant? If I didn’t know Paula my entire adult life, I’d think there was some strange logic going on here.”

  I picked at a chicken and sun-dried tomato salad that wasn’t half bad. Note to self, ask Babe to put this on the menu at the Paradise Diner.

  “Not that it isn’t always lovely to see you, Lucy, and it is, in fact, your apartment, but what are you doing here? I thought you weren’t due home for another week.”

  Lucy had been off on another adventure. This time to a spa that guaranteed a seven-pound weight loss to guests who paid a tidy sum for a one-week stay that included a secret Mayan treatment.

  “I’m keeping the world safe from unscrupulous and unhealthy diet factories,” she said, one arm raised, the other hand plucking a rippled chip from Jamal’s deluxe burger platter.

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “Of course it does. The Mayans didn’t have a Walgreens or Burger King, much less a decent restaurant in sight. They barely feed you and what they do let you eat and drink has you running to the bathroom all day.”

  She turned to J. C. and Jamal. “Excuse me … but somehow I feel as if we’ve fast-forwarded and it’s okay to mention bodily functions even at this early stage of our relationships.” They agreed.

  “No probs,” Jamal said. “They talk about manure all the time at the flower show.”

  Lucy didn’t recommend the program unless you were going to an awards show or an event where your old boyfriend was expected with his new and younger girlfriend, but even then the weight would all come back the minute you ate a normal meal or drank a glass of water.

  “There was more smuggling going on at that spa than there was in … I don’t know.”

  “Tijuana, dear,” J. C. said. “So you left early?”

  “Hell, no. Seven pounds is seven pounds. I wanted to see that lower number on the scale, even if it only lasted for a few hours. Look, I have proof.” She pulled a cell phone out of the waistband of her pants and, after pressing a few buttons, passed around the still-warm phone so we could all be witnesses to her success. “We weren’t supposed to bring cell phones—how ridiculous is that? How could I not take a picture?”

  “Nice pedicure,” I said, handing the phone back.

  Lucy yanked off a mukluk and wiggled five perfectly painted toes in a color I would have called Jungle Red. She looked around the room for approval.

  “This is okay, right? I haven’t offended anyone. I thought having already discussed the smallest room in the house…”

  She replaced her boot and looked at our plates to see what else she could nibble on, clearly subscribing to the “if it’s on someone else’s plate, the calories don’t count” rule. This time it was a pickle slice from me.

  “I know this probably isn’t the hot issue—and I’ll admit I haven’t done much decorating upstairs—but what’s the deal with the duct tape and the plastic tablecloths in my bedroom? Did you guys have a party? Not that I mind, but poor Harold will be crushed to have missed it.”

  “Who’s Harold?” I asked. It was unlike Lucy not to share romantic details.

  “I never told you about Harold?” she said. I shook my head.

  It turned out Harold was Harold Bergstein, the one neighbor she had connected with. He was a former editor at Glamour magazine.

  “I don’t usually read it,” she said. “Too many articles and not enough pictures.”

  Harold lived around the corner and had a direct line of sight into Lucy’s bedroom. Given the fact that he was in his eighties, Lucy had never minded the occasional fashion advice in her mailbox and had even left her card once so she could make sure she got Harold’s expert opinion right before going out.

  “It’s a joke. C’mon, the guy can barely see, for Pete’s sake. I bumped into him once at the Food Emporium with his caregiver—unless that was some other old guy giving me the eye.”

  Did I want to know that my best friend was an exhibitionist? Or that she was dancing around in her undies, as the cops had suggested? For an old guy who might have a heart attack if she modeled some of the things I saw hanging in her closet? Lucy didn’t see the problem with it.

  “He’s a friend. All he can see are the colors anyway. I tested him once. All he ever says is, ‘I like the green’ or ‘I like the black.’ He’s very partial to red.”

  Sounded like Guy Anzalone was off the hook as my Peeping Tom.

  “I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Lucy said.

  Jamal thought it was a riot. J. C. wasn’t so sure. “No, dear, you don’t, but we’ve had enough personal revelations for one evening.”

  She was right. We needed to decide what we were going to do next. In an attempt to redeem herself Lucy suggested she call a friend of hers, a fledgling novelist who taught writing at Penn State, to see if she knew anything about a professor who sounded like the one Emma had described.

  “He may not even exist—that young girl probably wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit her on the butt.” J. C. was still fuming over the lattice she’d have to repair.

  “Maybe not, but the best lies are the ones that have a grain of truth in them,” I said. “Lucy, do you mind calling her?”

  “We’re overdue for a phone call anyway. Sarah knows everyone. If this guy was within a hundred miles of her, she either knew him, dated him, or knew someone who did.”

  Fifty

  Like Emma the night before, Jamal Harrington must have decided he needed to get out of Dodge, because the next morning he was gone. No note. Nothing was missing. He’d repositioned the stone planter that held J. C.’s Pieris and taken a stab at fixing the fallen latticework. The tent was down and he’d replaced all the parts in the correct color-coded stuff bags.

  “Not easy to do in broad daylight, much less the early morning light of a gray day,” J. C. said. We stood in her apartment and she stretched to find something good to say about the boy’s unexplained disappearance. Even Lucy, who’d just met him, didn’t want to believe he’d been guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably his sympathetic reaction to the Harold story.

  It was the last day of the flower show and I still had a job to do, despite whatever else was going on and a restless night on Lucy’s sofa. I hadn’t been able to shake the unsettling feeling there was another old dear who had a direct line of sight into Lucy’s living room and images of me tossing and turning were going to wind up
on some geezer’s YouTube page.

  I had five hours to sell the rest of Primo’s creations, or otherwise pack them up and get them ready for shipping. I hadn’t heard from Hank Mossdale, so I enlisted Lucy’s help. She promised to arrive just after the doors opened to the public. I found Emma’s fake badge on the coffee table and told Lucy to flash it with her customary aplomb if anyone gave her trouble.

  “Please, I’ve gotten into A-list parties with attitude and a smile. I think I can handle the security guards at a flower show.” She pocketed the badge. Perversely I almost told her to look for one guard in particular when she showed up—Rolanda Knox. Lucy took a bag of popcorn from the fridge and shoved it in the microwave. So that explained the abundance of Orville Redenbacher’s.

  “Popcorn for breakfast?” I said.

  “Why not? It’s a grain.”

  * * *

  By the time I left Lucy’s, my head was filled with theories about Jamal and Emma. Where had they gone? Was Jamal meeting her? Even if he and Emma weren’t involved in the murder, they were brushing up against some ruthless people who probably were. I didn’t want to think either of them was involved in murder, especially Jamal. He seemed like a good kid, but was I prejudiced just because he was a gardener? If he’d been a basketball player or a rap artist, would I be more likely to think he was guilty?

  I closed the lobby door behind me and tucked my chin into my jacket against the damp spring morning. As I did, I glimpsed a scene reminiscent of the old television show Let’s Make a Deal. Three doors, three choices. The only things missing were Monty Hall and a trio of women in gowns.

  John Stancik was in a Crown Vic a few cars down on the left. He wore dark aviator glasses, and the newspaper he pretended to be reading was propped on his steering wheel. Even from a distance I could see a cardboard tray holding two large cups, the way a similar one had the night before.

  On my right, waiting at the traffic light, was a taxi, its roof light indicating it was free. Having the turtlelike peripheral vision of the experienced New York cabbie, the driver glanced in my direction with the barest tilt of his head. At the slightest encouragement or eye contact from me, he’d wait and I could jump in and be spirited away.

  And in between, parked illegally at a fire hydrant, happily munching a donut, was Guy Anzalone. The cab took off and I was down to two options. Or maybe not.

  I turned left and started walking. Going in this direction would add two blocks to the trip but I didn’t think either man would drive backward down a one-way street simply to offer me a lift, whatever it was they wanted to discuss—business or personal. I kept my chin tucked into my collar as if I hadn’t noticed Guy, and he seemed genuinely surprised I didn’t run over to his car as if we were headed down to the shore or a weekend in Atlantic City. I wasn’t much of a lip-reader but he seemed to be repeating aw, schucks, or perhaps it was the Brooklyn version of that expression.

  Stancik was quicker to react and automatically rolled down the passenger’s side window of the car just as I approached. He leaned across the empty seat to say something, knocking over two cups of steaming liquid onto the dashboard, his newspaper, a small notepad, and the front seat. He did not say aw, schucks.

  I intended to keep walking, but the scene was comical and I took pity on the poor man. Besides, he had given me information the night before—perhaps he’d do it again. I backtracked.

  “It’s cloudy. Are those glasses supposed to be a disguise?” I asked.

  If they were, they did nothing to hide the scruffy brush cut and dimpled chin that I hadn’t paid much attention to before but found suddenly vulnerable and appealing as Stancik juggled the dripping items.

  “Use the newspaper to sop it up, then I’ll throw it in the trash out here.” He did as he was told and I pitched the soggy mess in a Doe Fund trash can on the corner.

  I strolled back to the car, feeling smug. I drew the line at occupying the still wet seat in the front and climbed into the back, despite the way it looked. “You must be pretty wired. Have you been out here drinking coffee all night?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Just the last hour or so, since we picked up Jamal Harrington. I came back to talk to you.” I stopped feeling smug.

  According to Stancik, Jamal must have stayed on the terrace until about six A.M. when the neighborhood would be coming to life with the sounds of delivery trucks and people lining up for the soup kitchen at the church next door. He’d stopped at the Koreans and had the bad luck to bump into a couple of uniformed cops hassling a truck driver who was triple-parked while delivering cut flowers to the grocery store. “They recognized his description from a radio call. He slipped into a subway station, but one of the officers nabbed him while he was fumbling with his MetroCard,” Stancik said.

  “If he was a bad kid, wouldn’t he have jumped over the turnstile to get away?”

  “When was the last time you took the subway? It’s not that easy to do anymore. A lot of those old turnstiles have been replaced. So what did you and the kid you barely know talk about until the wee hours?”

  “I had no idea he’d be there.”

  “You’re lucky Labidou isn’t here. He’d be making cougar jokes. For someone who doesn’t know these boys, you do seem to be in the thick of it.”

  “I am, now that I’m getting daily visits from the NYPD.”

  Jamal told the cops about Garland’s jacket, so I didn’t have much to add except to repeat that he thought Otis Randolph had witnessed the exchange and would have been able to tell the cops it was a friendly one.

  “You don’t really think Jamal is your man, do you?”

  “I don’t think anything. I know he’s been in numerous altercations at his school. He was seen more than once with the victim, and he’s got the dead man’s jacket, passport, and a large amount of cash. More cash than a high school kid usually carries.”

  Jamal had said nothing to us about money or a passport.

  “Could Garland have forgotten those things were in his pockets when he gave the jacket to Jamal?”

  Stancik looked over his sunglasses. “Would you forget your passport and money if you were blowing town?”

  I did drive all the way to New Hampshire once without my wallet, but it wasn’t the same thing.

  “And now,” he said, “we have a statement from someone who claims the two men were in business together.” He gently pulled apart the coffee-splashed pages of his notepad, but I put two and two together faster and knew who the informant was before he said the name.

  “Emma Franklin,” I said.

  Fifty-one

  Stancik was lousy at hiding his reaction. “How did you guess?”

  “The Great Holliday never guesses. She knows.” I tapped my forehead with two fingers. I was tempted to call Emma a pathological liar but forced myself to exercise restraint.

  “I’d be very suspicious of anything that girl tells you. She may have a sweet and disarming exterior, but she is one of the most facile liars I’ve ever encountered.”

  “She’s a kid from Pennsylvania,” he said. “Never been in trouble. Her mother’s a doctor, stepdad’s in the import business. Are you basing this on something real or some women’s intuition thing?”

  “You’ve been hanging out with Labidou too long. He’s rubbing off on you. What does Emma say her role is in all this?” I asked.

  “An innocent duped by a new and unscrupulous boyfriend who wasn’t what he seemed to be.”

  “How did you find her?” I asked.

  “Painstaking detective work. She walked right into the precinct last night around midnight.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Fear? Remorse? She had no place to go?”

  “Did you hold her?”

  “We’re not in the habit of incarcerating people who come in of their own free will to make statements.”

  By the time we’d pulled up at the Wagner, I told the cop everything I knew, up to and including my firm belief that any incriminatin
g evidence found in Jamal’s possession had been planted there by Emma—or whatever her real name was—most likely when he and J. C. had gone into the basement to get the sleeping gear and I’d briefly followed them.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “Anywhere from here to Timbuktu. How should I know?”

  “That girl is literally unbelievable,” I said, amping up a notch. “She may be Emma Franklin or that may be another identity she’s temporarily borrowing. She’s like Scheherazade, spinning a different tale every time she opens her mouth.”

  “Maybe she’s doing it to stay alive, too. But it gets worse.”

  “How much worse could it get? She’s pregnant with Garland’s child?”

  “Not for her. She’s suggested that you and some older woman are also involved. That you’re in cahoots with this Jamal and maybe even with the people Garland was supposed to get money from. We’re gonna assume that the money wasn’t a belated Christmas or Hanukkah present. It was most likely a drug deal or extortion.”

  “Well, now you know she’s nuts, right? Right?”

  Wrong. I could almost hear him. All he knew was that I, too, had been seen with the dead man. That, according to Emma, and maybe even Rolanda, I’d tried to smuggle Garland into the convention center, that I was the last person to have possession of his missing bag. I’d also been seen at a local diner having breakfast with Jamal and the wife of a man who may or may not be a mobster.

  Emma didn’t know, but if the cops had asked around further, they’d find that I’d had drinks with the Anzalones the night Garland was killed and telephone records would show he’d repeatedly called me earlier that same evening. I began to see how easy it was to put together a circumstantial case against someone if that’s what you wanted to do. And it scared the pants off me. If that was the way a straight-arrow woman from the suburbs felt, I could imagine how a kid like Jamal Harrington felt. Now I knew why he’d run.