Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Do you know what this key fits?” I asked Sally.

  “No.”

  “What did she look like? Anne Winston.”

  “Pretty, a blonde …”

  “Dye job? Wig?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did she pay by credit card?”

  “Cash.”

  “Did she talk about me?”

  “Not by name. I never identified you by name.”

  Well, that was big of her. It would be so hard to figure out who Sally’s unnamed redheaded friend who worked in twenty-four-hour news was.

  “Whatever. She knew we were all going to go out tonight. She knew it was a Girls’ Night Out.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “And this envelope came to you by FedEx today?”

  “How did you know?”

  I’m a fucking psychic, I thought, but didn’t say. I filled Sally in on what had gone down, watching her expression grow sadder and more alarmed. When Sally’s face grew sad, it was heartbreaking. I thought to myself, I bet she had super-cooties when she was a kid.

  “Anne Winston is Julie Goomey,” I said. Julie might have had a co-conspirator named Anne who worked with her at this perverse charity, but Julie wouldn’t send someone else to get info on me from Sally. She’d have too much fun doing it herself.

  “I was so sure about her. I was so sure about what I saw for her. How could I be so wrong?”

  “You’re only human.”

  “I fucked it up. I am so worthless.… I am such a fraud.”

  “Sally, everyone makes mistakes.”

  “Now I know what my orange dream means. It means I’m a fraud.”

  “The orange dream?”

  “I dreamed I invented the orange. I didn’t have any money for the subway, so I gave the token clerk my orange, and he threw it onto the tracks. A big rat came and took it and it was gone. And it was the only orange in existence.” At this, she burst into tears.

  Suddenly, I realized that, in some weird way, Sally was right to shave her head and have a scorpion up the back of it. It was right for her to express herself. She was weird and tough (scorpion), vulnerable and exposed (bald head). Now that I thought about it, this suited her. When Sally was completely insane in the spring, after her cat, Pie, died and her then True Love pulled a gun on her and took off with her life savings, she started wearing that wig, going without makeup, and wearing dull clothes. It was so nutty. For her, I mean. It was like she had slipped into another person’s skin, kind of the way the actors in horror movies slipped into prosthetic faces and other body parts. Yet I knew this must have been how she looked, more or less, back when she was growing up in Darien, Connecticut, before she went to Princeton and fell in with a coven of witches there.

  The wig and the clothes lasted about a week. Then I hired her to consult on our special report on the paranormal, and she reverted to herself.

  “Sally, calm down. Don’t jump to any conclusions. Everything will be fine,” I said, putting one arm around her.

  “How do you know everything will be okay?”

  “I have no choice but to believe that,” I said.

  “Maybe if I burn some bladderwrack … Omigod, bladderwrack won’t do it, will it? I really fucked up,” Sally said. “I’m a complete fraud. I knew it.”

  “Sally, don’t do anything drastic. Everything is going to be all right.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told your friend, that everything would be all right, and I was wrong,” Sally bawled so the whole place could hear. I’m sure this instilled lots of confidence in people who were waiting to have their fortunes read. “Oh God, I just had a vision flash through my head … a terrible vision.…”

  “It’s all some kind of joke, Sally. Don’t panic. You’re only human. Can you tell me anything else about this Anne, whose name is really Julie?”

  “She seemed so nice. I was helping her a lot with her problems.”

  “What problems?”

  “The married boss, the wife, and she had a bad childhood.”

  Julie’s childhood was bad, I had to admit. But lots of people had shittier childhoods. Sooner or later, you deal with it and move on, right?

  Sally couldn’t stop crying. I kept rubbing her back with one hand as I whipped out my notebook with the other and started playing with the name. Anne Winston. It wasn’t up to Julie’s regular standards. She’d always liked aliases like Carol Merrill, Terence J. Mahoney, or Putli Bai, Indian Bandit Queen.

  I studied the clue again.

  “Grand,” I read again. “Four Eyes cousin with leg braces.”

  It took me a few minutes of brain strain and a few more passes over the clue to figure it all out. Grand was the name of the best hotel in Ferrous.

  Four Eyes. There was a kid, a grade ahead, nicknamed Four Eyes. Come to think of it, he had a young cousin with leg braces who attended Camp Hapalot.… Victor? Vincent.

  There was a Hotel Vincent, near Gramercy Park, and we had stopped there, very, very briefly, that night in New York, on the ride back to our hotel.

  My phone rang in my hand, startling me and scaring Sally into a more energetic round of sobbing.

  “Robin? Claire. Still can’t find anything on Anne Winston.”

  “I wonder if she’s a real person, and Julie’s just been using her name tonight. Hmmm. What about George the rich guy?”

  Sally got up and went to the bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her order and pound back a shot of something.

  “Nothing yet,” Claire said. “Nobody on the night shift has a fucking clue, so I’m sitting here between two computers, one doing a slow search through last week’s scripts for the words ‘fugitive’ and ‘George,’ and another flashing all the newsphotos we used last week during my shows. I’ll know it when I see the photo. I’ve only got a few dozen more to go through. Where are you going now?”

  “The Hotel Vincent. I don’t know why yet, but I guess I’ll find out when I get there.”

  “I’ll call you when I find out who this guy is and why he’s news,” Claire said. “Have you heard from Tamayo?”

  “No. Wasn’t she with you?”

  “She went to check out the apartment building Julie Goomey lived in before 1990.”

  “I was just about to call her.…”

  “I just called her, Rob. There was no answer. I’m worried. Very worried.”

  “She may have gone to talk to someone and left the phone somewhere. You know how absent-minded she can be.”

  “Robin, I have a very bad feeling about all this. Be careful, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Sally was at the bar talking to Greg the “warlock.” I saw her put back another shot of something.

  “Sally, I gotta go,” I said. “Take it easy, sweetie.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, already slurring her words.

  “No, you can’t go with me. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Have another drink,” said the warlock.

  I wanted to stay and look after Sally, but I couldn’t, and I couldn’t take her with me either, not in her state. Jeez, this good-friend stuff was tricky. Before I left, I called a car service to get a car to take her home. Even though it was just a few long blocks from here back to our apartment building, and traffic was going to be a pain because of all the people on the streets, I felt better having professionals take her home. There was a long wait for a car, so I took the bartender aside and asked her to keep an eye out for Sally in the interim, try to get her away from the warlock. I also left a message with the bartender for Tamayo, in case she showed up here, that I was going to the Hotel Vincent, and she should call me or Claire.

  When I left the Neon Hand on Avenue A, that Yma Sumac song I’d heard at Joy II, “Virgenes del Sol,” started playing in an endless loop somewhere at the back of my head—beating drums, chanting men, Yma’s desperate, ethereal shriek. My heart was beating to the drums. I couldn’t even feel my legs.

  The mega
vitamin was finally kicking in.

  16

  ON AVENUE A, I made my way through the sea of garish masks and painted faces—two people in big Babar heads, a couple of skeletons, some ghosts, vampires, aliens—as well as people not in costumes. I saw Munch’s The Scream walking behind me, and that gave me a start. Maybe it was a different The Scream. Maybe it was an amazing coincidence.

  I looked down 10th Street, my street. Beams of artificial light glanced off the dark street, sharp as knives, from the bright lights along the basketball-court fence. I was just a block and a half from my bed, from safety, and it was with a heavy heart I kept on walking towards Gramercy.

  There were too many voices in my head. I felt like the guy with the tinfoil earmuffs, trying to tune in a clear signal. I couldn’t hear the voice in my own head. I heard Julie’s voice, Claire’s, Old Hobnail’s, Sally’s, Tamayo’s, Yma Sumac’s, Mary MacCosham’s.…

  I was within sight of the Vincent now. Julie and I had stopped outside the Hotel Vincent for, maybe, five minutes that night in 1979. Because of an unexpected detour, caused by a minor car accident, we’d turned west in the Gramercy Park area and gone past it. Julie, struck by it, asked the driver to stop. It is a very impressive-looking building, a Victorian Gothic red brick building with wrought-iron balconies and a lot of interesting turrets and gargoyles. We spent all of five minutes looking at it and then, as I recall, I got cranky because I was tired and drunk and needed some sleep. After that, I know we went back to the Abbey Victoria. The next day, we’d looked up the Vincent in a guidebook and learned it was a historic artists’ hotel, home to a lot of famous painters over the years.

  “Let’s stay there next time we come to New York,” Julie said. She’d said the same thing about the ritzy Hotel Delmonico up on Park Avenue, and the Plaza on Fifth, so the Vincent didn’t stick with me particularly.

  We didn’t come back to New York together, but Julie stayed here when she came back to New York the summer of 1979 with Mary MacCosham. The Vincent must have been a walk on the wild side for her then best friend, Mary. It’s a bohemian residential hotel, a refuge for tortured, semi-insane artists and the like, known variously to its residents as The Mothership, The Asylum, and, during those creatively dry times when the rent is overdue, The Dorm at Hell U.

  My phone rang.

  “Robin? Claire.”

  I could hardly hear her.

  “You have to shout, Claire, I’m getting a low-battery light in my phone now. Shit. I have lousy phone karma.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes. I finally jumped in a cab. I’m heading down to the Hotel Vincent, Robin. Do you recognize the name Johnny ‘Nostrils’ Chiesa?”

  “It sounds familiar. But why?”

  Her voice faded in and out. “… don of the Perrugia family … the guy in the tub …”

  “George the rich guy?”

  “George is Johnny,” she shouted, and began reading. “Like the Genovese family, the Perrugias resisted narcotics and pornography, reputedly concentrating on loan-sharking and protection rackets in New York’s Garment District and Times Square. They claim they are in the Italian soda-import business and … have a successful soda business.

  “Johnny … husband of the eldest of Gaspar and Sophia Perrugia’s four daughters … no sons.

  “… family prospered in the 1980s, adding the Wall Street district to its loan-sharking operations.…”

  Her voice zoned out completely at this point. I shook the phone until it came in a little clearer.

  “… crackdown on the Big Five families took a big bite out of their income, they recovered in the early 1990s by expanding their money-laundering operations. Even … IRS admits they can’t trace … family’s byzantine transactions.…”

  “What? I can’t hear you, Claire.”

  “… only the since-recanted testimony of a rival Genovese capo to go on.”

  “George or Johnny, whoever he is, why was he news this week?”

  “… to be sentenced yesterday on a weapons violation, and he disappeared … a fugitive …”

  “Does it say anything about Frankie the Fish?” A Perrugia-family thug, murdered long ago, somehow figured into all this. Damn. My life had been so murder-free for so long. It made me think of these lifeguards in Florida who threw a party to celebrate their first year without a tragedy, during which party a guest fell into the pool and drowned.

  “What?” She shouted.

  I was thinking out loud. “And who is Granny?” I shouted.

  “… matriarch, mother of Gaspar … Chiesa’s grandmother-in-law.”

  “Why do I have a feeling Granny is our ace in the hole?”

  “How so, Rob?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Or, as the Afghans say, you’re not even at the Bara River and already you’re removing your trousers.”

  There was silence. When Claire’s voice came back in, I heard, “… haven’t heard from Tamayo. Tried calling her …”

  “I’m losing you, Claire.”

  “Robin, they may have tuned in to your phone frequency …” she said, and then my phone went dead. I shook it a few times, but nothing happened.

  If George was Johnny Nostrils, then maybe that fed was a fed. But who were the four wig-wearing women? The four daughters of Gaspar and Sophia, I thought. And they had Kathy. They knew I’d talked to that fed, so they must have been following me. I looked back, and saw a few people, no one wearing anything I recognized, no nose glasses or The Screams lurking about, though they may have been ducking in and out of the shadows. From now on, I had to watch what I said, what I did.

  If I tried calling in the authorities now, Kathy, and maybe Tamayo, could be in danger. What to do, what to do. Claire would know what to do. I hoped.

  Johnny Chiesa, fugitive—and what better night to make your escape than Halloween. He’d been at the Help for Kids office, Kathy had called there. Had he lured her up to find out why she was on his trail? Was Julie setting him up? How exactly did she figure into this? Did his wife find him there? That must have been where they grabbed Kathy.… Was Johnny dead in the tub, or faking his death so he could get away? Why was he running out on a bullshit weapons rap anyway, when he could do the year, be out, be back in business?

  It was still sinking in. Unless I’d misunderstood Claire, George the rich guy was Johnny Nostrils, wanted mobster. We hadn’t been out with a generous, sophisticated businessman during our first trip to New York. We’d been out with a gangster. No bloody wonder people fell all over themselves to kiss our asses and give us free stuff when we walked into those designer showrooms with Johnny Nostrils. Jesus, we were so naive.

  That’s why George looked familiar in that old photograph, I thought. I must have seen his picture somewhere in a mob story, and filed it away in the useless-information part of my brain. I’m not a big mob maven. My ex, Burke, was really into mob stories, but I was always more interested in stories about people who killed people they were supposed to love.

  Living in New York, you can’t help picking up a little of the mob news just by osmosis. I mean, I knew the big stuff, about John Gotti, and about Chin Gigante, who eluded jail for a long time by feigning madness, walking up and down Mulberry in his bathrobe and slippers muttering to himself. And, thanks to an organized-crime exhibit at the New York Historical Society, which Burke had taken me to, I knew a few historical stories about the mob—how Albert Anastasia was gunned down in a barbershop chair at the Park Sheraton, how a Murder Inc. stool pigeon, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was put into protective custody and despite a twenty-four-hour armed guard was pushed to his death from his room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. I knew that a century ago gangs calling themselves the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits roamed Five Points (the intersection of Orange, Cross, Anthony, Little Water, and Mulberry streets in what is now Little Italy/Chinatown), and that in the nineteenth century a ruffian-for-hire routinely charged $2 for a punch, $15 to bite o
ff an ear, and $100 to kill someone.

  But about contemporary mobsters I knew very little. Just enough to know that these are not people to fuck with. Duh.

  Well, there’s a big difference between me and Julie, I thought. To me, “don’t fool around with mobsters” is a matter of common sense. Admittedly, common sense isn’t my strong point, but I’d had more of it than Julie. Julie had had a different kind of genius.

  It was too bad we got so drunk the night we met the gangsters. Although, in retrospect, I don’t think we had more than a half-dozen wine spritzers each in the course of the night, and we’d eaten a couple of times. Hmmm. Being older and wiser, etc., I had to wonder if George/ Johnny or Billy hadn’t slipped something into our drinks. When we got home, we slept eleven hours, through two wakeup calls.

  Despite everything, I couldn’t believe Julie would put me through all this without a very good reason. There had been bad times, sure, there had been resentments and, apparently, long-held grudges. But you grow up, a little bit, let go of some of the past, decide what you want to carry with you into the future.

  There had been good times too. She had to remember those. There had been love there. And co-conspiracy. We learned a lot from each other. The first time I kissed a boy was in her basement, the first time I smoked a cigarette was with her, the first time I tasted a beer. Together, we got even with Mary MacCosham. Julie told me about sex and went with me to buy Tampax to replace the awkward Kotex belt-and-pad contraption. I could still see Julie unflinchingly taking the Tampax to the drugstore counter and paying for it, in full sight of everyone in the store. I thought that was so brave.

  True, at times I was a shitty friend to Julie. I ratted her out, indirectly, to Doug Gribetz. Not only that, but I ratted Julie out to our sewing teacher, Old Hobnail, after the wet-ass incident. I never told Julie that either. After Hobbins caught up with her, I let her think Hobbins had figured it out for herself. Of course, now I realize, Hobbins did figure it out. She detained me and accused me in order to put a wedge between me and Julie, punish us both in a sinister way, by making me rat Julie out.