by A. E. Roman
Yolanda bit her thick bottom lip, handed me her nanny card with a long gold fingernail, and said, “If you need anything else, you call me. Any time.”
I smiled and Yolanda stared at me and smiled back. And then Mimi cleared her throat and I helped Yolanda put on her gold-colored winter coat and grab her gold-colored purse off the counter.
Mimi cleared her throat again and made a face at me. She signaled not-so-discreetly by rubbing her fingers together as Yolanda stood there blinking at me.
“Oh,” I said. “The reward.”
I took out a hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Yolanda.
Yolanda frowned. “Mimi said two hundred.”
“Right,” I said and shot Mimi a look. Mimi, who understood the price of doing business and sharing the wealth, just smiled big. I handed Yolanda one hundred more and headed for the door behind her as she made her way home across the street to her husband and daughter over La Valencia Bakery.
“Where are you going, Chico?” asked Mimi.
“I’m off to see a Greek in Astoria.”
“Wait!” she said, and grabbed her keys and winter coat and snapped off the lights.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I go with you,” said Mimi. “I can help you, Chico. Yolanda told me todo about this George Theodorus. You will need me.”
“Need you?” I said. “Why would I need you?”
Theodorus Taverna in Astoria was full of Greek men mostly, smoking and drinking, playing chess and talking. A waitress with hairy forearms and a bit of a mustache was collecting dirty coffee cups and smoking a Marlboro. The man behind the counter was the same potbellied Greek all right, still short, still bald, still wearing what looked like the same short-sleeved shirt and black slacks he was wearing that night we met.
George Theodorus gave me a look that said he didn’t know me and didn’t wanna know me.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“We met,” I said. “That night with Pilar. You were picking up some ouzo. Remember?”
George Theodorus seemed to remember and shot me a dirty look and then he saw Mimi behind me with her red mane and cleavage and his look changed. He came from behind the counter and greeted me with a big bear hug like he’d known me for years. “Pilar,” he said. “My poor Pilar.”
Then George turned to Mimi. He grabbed her hand and kissed it and then kissed both her cheeks and said, “And who is this beautiful young red-headed Helen? From what Troy did you escape?”
Mimi giggled like she was the popular cheerleader in high school meeting the football star for the first time. George invited us to sit, to eat, to whatever we wanted or needed. We were his guests. We were welcomed. The cash register, perhaps?
Okay. Maybe Mimi was right. Maybe I did need her.
We went and sat at a small table in the back, under a giant fresco of the Parthenon in ancient Greece and a signed ancient publicity photo of the actress Anna Magnani. Maria Callas sang Pagliacci. George brought us cups of espresso and plates of stuffed grape leaves, feta cheese, and olives and insisted on telling Mimi about his world travels. Finally, after half an hour of this, I said, “I want to be honest with you, George. I’m not just a friend of Pilar’s. I’m a private investigator, investigating the disappearance of a girl named Tiffany Rivera. I think that Pilar’s death smells fishy. Can you get me into her apartment for a look around?”
“What do you think, George?” asked Mimi.
George nodded thoughtfully for a long time, staring at me and then at Mimi. Then he made a call to his friend Nikos, Pilar’s landlord, another bachelor who made ouzo in his basment and who George had been visiting for his monthly supply the night I bumped into him with Pilar.
We went back to Pilar’s building on Ditmars. George’s friend Nikos, who greeted us wearing a cheap three-piece suit, a striped tie, and a comb-over, kept smiling at Mimi after kissing her repeatedly on both cheeks like a man in the desert kissing a bucket of fresh water. Nikos called me a capitalist tool, politically ignorant, bourgeois, and an anarchist, and then gave me permission to check Pilar’s apartment. I checked the stairs and the roof first, looking for some sign of foul play that the cops might have missed. Nothing. Nikos let us into Pilar’s apartment.
I found no videotape marked “Car.”
“What are you looking for, Chico?” Mimi said. “I don’t know.”
That’s when I saw the poem on the altar again, “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath. I also found a folded piece of paper. It was some kind of title page.
Trilogy of Terror
by Irving Goldberg Jones
Later, George and Mimi and I walked and went and sat in Athens Park before a statue of Socrates. Nikos wanted to come but George said that he needed to talk to me and Mimi alone. As we sat, sandwiched between a children’s playground and a basketball court, George told us that he would stay up with Pilar and Irving for many nights in this park or at the café, sharing the joys of poetry and philosophy and writing and ouzo and arguing the meaning of life and love. He smiled shyly at Mimi when he said love. He became almost like a second father to them, he said.
“What do you know about Tiffany and Olga Rivera?” I asked.
“Olga?” George said. “I never met the girl. But Pilar and Irving told me that she was a lawyer who wanted to be a writer. Irving helped her sign up for a writing class at Hunter College, where his father teaches, behind her parents’ backs. Her parents would have stopped her if they knew, said Irving. It was bad enough she was dating some filmmaker.”
“Albert?” I said.
“Yes!” said George and slapped my leg too hard. “That’s his name. Never met him either. Olga, Tiffany, Albert, Marcos, I know the names. They were Pilar and Irving’s Manhattan friends. They never came to Queens. And Tiffany? One of the things I know about that girl is that Irving was nuts for her and that she was the reason Irving and Pilar stopped talking.”
“What happen?” said Mimi.
George continued, looking only at Mimi now. “One night here after they came back from the city, after some film, Metropolis, I think, Pilar and Irving had a big fight.”
“About what?” I asked.
“About a story that Irving wrote,” said George. “Pilar went home crying. That night, Irving sat right here and confessed to me that they knew something about Tiffany, who comes from a very powerful and dirty family. Something about a murder.”
Mimi crossed herself. “Dios mio!”
George looked at Mimi intensely. “Murder! My soul wept for that poor boy. Just nineteen years old and a beautiful boy with a beautiful soul in love with the common good and what has he gotten himself mixed up in?”
“Pobrecito!” said Mimi.
“Irving talked,” said George, “about feeling divided and torn. And he wept and talked about loyalty and telling the truth and how guilty he felt, and how he cried, like Orpheus losing his love he cried. He was in hell. The morning after, he denied the whole thing. Claimed he was drunk. Blamed it on the ouzo. But he wasn’t just drunk.”
“About how long has it been since you saw Irving last?” I asked.
George was staring in Mimi’s eyes and Mimi said, “How long?”
“About two months.” George said, eyes on Mimi. “You can’t bullshit a Greek, Mimi. In six days the Greeks created civilization. On the seventh day we created bullshit.”
“No bullshit!” Mimi agreed.
“Exactly,” said George. “You are from my generation, Mimi. You know.”
Mimi gave me an I-told-you-so look. “I know.”
“And Irving knew,” said George. “Irving and Pilar knew something about this Tiffany and a murder and now Pilar is dead.”
“Who do you think may have wanted Pilar dead?” I asked.
“The person who pulls all the strings,” George said and looked over his shoulder. “Don’t need a reason.”
“Who pulls the strings?” asked Mimi.
“Pilar knew too much,” Georg
e whispered. “Somebody wanted it covered up, just like Kennedy.”
“Okay,” I said. “Who?”
“Who has million-dollar companies on the stock market? Who owns apartment buildings in New York and property all over? Who travels the world and eats in expensive restaurants every night?”
“The Candy Man?”
“Chico!” snapped Mimi.
“Rivera,” said George.
“Which Rivera?” I asked.
“Pick one,” said George. “The whole barrel is rotten. Find Irving. He knows what happened to Pilar. He knows that the Rivera family is somehow responsible. Find the story.”
I pulled out the title page that I found at Pilar’s. “This story? ‘Trilogy of Terror?’”
George shrugged and looked around and took Mimi’s hand, “We’re probably all in danger. They’re probably watching us now.”
Mimi jumped up and looked around nervously. “Chico! Vámonos!”
“No!” said George, also jumping up. “Wait, Mimi!”
“No wait!” said Mimi, walking away. “Watching us? No! You wait!”
So much for the Puerto Rican Agatha Christie.
I grabbed George by the arm: “Did you actually see this story that Irving wrote?”
“No,” said George.
“Do you know where I can find Irving?”
“HMD,” said George and quickly told me that Irving Goldberg Jones was an English major at Columbia University where Olga Rivera was a student. Irving lived on the Lower East Side with his mother and worked as a messenger at HMD Financial, owned and operated by the Rivera family, where Olga helped him get a part-time job.
I was posing as a waiter at HMD Financial and Irving Goldberg Jones was right under my nose all along.
“Chico!” yelled Mimi, standing at the entrance to the park. “Vámonos!”
“I’d like to talk to Irving.”
“Irving will not talk to you,” said George.
“Maybe you could talk to him for me? Introduce us?”
“Irving stopped talking to me,” said George, heading toward Mimi, “after I told him that he had to tell the police if he knew anything criminal about this Tiffany. You’re a cop. Irving hates cops.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. We don’t look as good in uniform and we’re a little more bitter—served best with a white zinfandel.”
George put his hand over his heart. “Pilar. She was a real good soul, you know? Clean. You too, Chico. And Mimi. Especially Mimi. I’m Greek. Greeks can tell.”
“A clean soul. Is that a good thing?”
“Real good,” George said. “If this Tiffany or any of her family did something to Pilar, I want you to get them.”
“Most definitely,” I said.
I shook George’s hand as we walked out of the park toward Mimi, and George said, “Trust no one,” as Mimi walked briskly before us toward my Charger repeating, “Chico! Let’s go! Vámonos!”
ELEVEN
Murder. Murder. Murder. I couldn’t sleep. I opened my eyes, and there were tears, and that same fucking lump in my throat. I got to my feet, went over to the kitchenette, opened the refrigerator, grabbed a beer that I had picked up earlier at the local bodega, popped it, and drank deep. I popped another one and drank that one, too. Then a third. It was starting again. The slipping back. As the light of the refrigerator cut through the darkness, the theme of my old life became visible in my basement apartment. I was alone. I had no one to count on and no one counted on me.
I lit a cigarette and looked around my one room. Everything had been scattered around by Oscar and Sal; my files, storage boxes, surveillance equipment, amateur boxing trophies, amateur martial arts trophies, amateur bowling trophies, my mother’s rosary, old Curtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash tapes, old comic books, drawing pads, colored pencils, a baseball autographed by New York Yankee Roberto Clemente, and books Ramona had given me. I was gonna read them all some day. I picked up an old copy of the Daily News. I stared at the old advertisement I’d been saving:
Bronx Office Space
Available immediately in beautiful building on
149th Street and 3rd Avenue
Oh, I had plans.
I threw the paper down and grabbed my once favorite coffee cup, embossed with HAMLET in red letters. Another gift from Ramona from the times we had gone to see free Shakespeare in Central Park.
I picked out the signed copy of her paperback novel, Driving Lessons. Ramona—hazel eyes, fleshy lips, kinky reddish hair—smiled all sultry on the book’s back cover. Before she had kicked me out of our rent-controlled Park Slope apartment six months ago, Ramona had accused me of suffering from serious trust issues because of the murder of my father and the loss of my mother when I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx. Things I could easily face in therapy, she said, if I stopped trying so hard to be a tough guy. Right. But that wasn’t why she threw me out. It was the drinking and the smoking and the women.
Okay.
Maybe it was just the women.
I picked up the file on my father’s murder, Adam Santana. They found my father, doctor to the poor and misbegotten, dead in his South Bronx medical office on Longwood Avenue with seven bullets in his back. There were crime scene photos, police reports, medical reports, forensic reports, ballistic reports, blueprints, fingerprints, footprints, facts, names, words, Savage Nomads, Red Skulls, Black Panthers, Young Lords, Los Macheteros, everything and nothing. Words on white paper. Words, words, words. Facts, all disconnected. I had gotten this material with the help of Joy St. James and her police connections.
I picked up the missing person reports on my mother, Gloria Santana. I had everything I needed to get started, to solve my father’s murder and track down my mother. I could hear Nicky Brown’s voice saying, “So when are you gonna get started, baby? Today is today.”
I picked up a framed wedding photo from the floor: Ramona in a beautiful white silk wedding dress, being embraced by me in a black suit, kissing at the columned entrance to The New York Public Library. Married in a Catholic church. The intimate wedding, down the aisle, ceremony and reception, twenty-five guests. Our song was Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”
I put the photo down and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. I stood wet at the bathroom mirror. Ramona’s faded note was still taped to the middle of the glass: I feel so lonely with you.
I thought about Hannibal Rivera’s twenty-five thousand dollars in the sock under my bed. I felt the lump in my throat. It was the same lump, the same burn in my eyes and chest. The lump felt new, as if I was reading Ramona’s note for the first time.
I feel so lonely with you. It was the cruelest thing you could say to the person you claimed to love and cherish forever. Even if it was true.
That same Friday night, showered, cologned, mouthwashed, and aftershaved, I went looking for Ramona again in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Maybe it was the money. A little more money might make all the difference, I thought.
I drove from the Bronx to Brooklyn. It was 1 A.M. when I parked near Grand Army Plaza and got out of the Charger and walked toward Prospect Park. It was freezing and dark. The Brooklyn library stood majestic in the distance and a cold wind blew, as if to say, “It’s over, Chico. Go away.” I walked beside the park, shivering.
I walked for blocks until I could see Smiles Pizza and looked up at my old apartment at the top of the three-story brownstone. I quickly crossed the street and ran up the steps. I rang the bell. No answer. I almost yelled out, Ramona! But I didn’t. I just kept on ringing. No answer. No luck. I used my old keys to enter the building, walked up to the third floor, and rang the bell at the door. The bell gave a small tinkle and I whispered, “Mona?”
I tried my old keys again, but found the locks had been changed.
Then the door opened and I saw her. She was wearing a nightgown and slippers in the shape of cats. Her face was brown and her thick, kinky reddish hair fell down about her should
ers.
“Hello, Mrs. Chico,” I said.
“Are you insane?”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “Of course I’m insane. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m a writer,” she said. “And at six in the morning I have to be at the library, where I have a job, where I pretend to be as sane as everybody else so I can pay my bills. So whatever this is, I can’t.”
I put on my best sad face. Ramona frowned but stepped aside and I walked into my old apartment and scanned the room. Everything, except the red rocking chair, was either gone or packed in brown moving boxes. The African masks were off the red walls and rugs were off the wood floors. The tall red bookshelf that used to be filled with the books of Zora Neale Hurston and Virginia Woolf and Nella Larson and Marguerite Duras were bare. The Earth, Wind, and Fire albums were packed away with the Nina Simone, jazz, blues, and classical CDs, the Miles Davis print, and the balls of colorful yarn and knitting needles. The green houseplants that had covered every windowsill and the three stacks of New Yorker magazines that used to sit on the coffee table beside the French-English and Spanish-English dictionaries were gone. The only other object in the room not in a box or wrapped in crumpled sheets from the New York Times was a new manuscript.
The Detective
by Ramona Guzman Balaguer
Fiction again. Damn writers. They needed stories. Their story. Your story. That’s what writers did. They stole. You’re just giving her more material, Chico. What’re you doing here? What’re you thinking? This is nuts.
The two fat Siamese cats, Pushkin and Alexandre, scampered into the living room. Pushkin came brave and running, greeting my leg with head butting, body caresses, and purrs as if to say, “Wa’sup, long time no see, bro.”
Alexandre, as usual, stopped, looked up at me with those wide and petrified blue eyes, and shot back out of the room, as if his tail had been set on fire. After ten years, Alexandre still didn’t like me.
“Are you drunk?” Ramona asked,
“No.”
