Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

No, she merely took this as an obvious statement of fact—and it was.

  He poured a shot of liquor into her cup. “All you gotta do is mention the name of the company three times, then hit the road. What could be easier?” He opened the package of cheese and pushed it across the desk—all for her. Was there a more generous boss in the entire—

  “No.” Johanna sliced off a hunk of cheese with the letter opener that passed for a paring knife after hours. “Get someone else to do it.”

  “I tried. I told the producer I got five guys with more experience. Then Ian Zachary phones me himself. Says he only wants you. I call that odd.” It could not be the novelty of a hunchback that so enticed the talk-show host; this was radio, not television. “The guy wants a woman crime-scene cleaner, but he hasn’t tried any competitors yet, and they’ve got more broads than we do. Me, I never heard the guy’s act. You ever tune into his show?”

  “Every night,” she said.

  It surprised him that she would admit to being a shock-radio listener, but then, he had always suspected her of being dead honest at core—even though he was ninety-nine percent sure that she had lied on her job application. But this only enhanced the ongoing mystery of Jo. It was a little taste of police work, The Job, the only one that had ever mattered.

  A chill breeze of outside air ruffled the papers on the desk. Every muscle in Riker’s body tensed, and his hand went to that place where he had once carried a shoulder holster. The feeling of cold panic was not unreasonable, not this time, for the intruder in the next room had neatly stepped over the doormat, avoiding the concealed buzzer that loudly announced each exit and entry.

  Paranoia was a contagious thing. Jo was also staring at the office door.

  Kathy Mallory appeared on the threshold. The young detective wore a long, black duster in the best tradition of the Old West—a gunslinger with a subscription to Vogue magazine.

  You spooky kid.

  Riker smiled, always glad to see his partner on these rare occasions when she stopped by to discover that they had nothing to say to one another anymore. He had missed her so much—and he wished that she would never come back again.

  Poor Jo was startled into spilling her drink. Stunning Mallory, straight and tall, always had an adverse effect on her. By luck or design, his partner only visited when Jo was in the office, and that was a pity. It was almost an assault to put Mallory in the same room with her.

  Jo rose from the chair, making exit apologies with her mouth full of goat cheese, not wanting to spend one more second in the younger woman’s company. Perhaps it was the way Mallory looked at her with the eye of a predator that had not fed recently. When the office door had been softly shut, Mallory waited a beat until she heard the buzzer and then the close of the outer door. She turned on Riker.

  “Hey, Kathy.” His greeting was met with a cold glare to remind him of the rules: it was always Mallory now and never Kathy anymore, not since she had joined NYPD. As if he could throw away all of her puppy days—watching Kathy grow, though his old friend’s foster daughter had never been a real child, not in terms of innocence. After a little girl had lived on the streets awhile, homeless and eating her dinner from trash cans, childhood was over. But Riker had done his small part to make certain that she never went hungry again. He had a favorite memory of taking Kathy to a baseball game when she was eleven years old. He had bought her enough hot dogs and soda to bring on projectile vomit.

  Food was love.

  In that same spirit, he pushed the remaining goat cheese in her direction. It was all that he had to offer her these days. “Mallory,” he said. “Hungry?”

  She leaned over his desk to drop a computer spit-out on top of his mountain of bills and forms, time sheets and invoices. Without even glancing at her offering, he guessed that she had made good on a threat, and this was the background check on Jo.

  “Her name isn’t Josephine Richards,” said Mallory. “That’s an alias.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Big surprise.” Riker picked up the sheet, and, without reading it, he wadded it into a ball. “You might’ve noticed—” He dropped it into a wastebasket. “I don’t need any more paper today. But thanks anyway.”

  She glared at the pile on his desk and the other pile that had slopped to the floor, all the paperwork that was burying him alive. He could see that she was longing to create order out of the chaos, to align every sheet and envelope, every paper clip and pencil at right angles. Mallory was freakish about neatness, and that was her most benign personality trait.

  With a slow shift of strategy, she settled into a chair. Her head rolled to one side, eyes closing to languid slits of green, calm and drowsy. Riker had seen Jo’s cat do this, and he knew it was a trick to lull him into a false idea that he was safe from attack.

  “You haven’t been reading your personal mail,” she said. “I bet you’re wondering how I know that.”

  Riker did not like to repeat himself, so this time he only waved one hand to say, Yeah, yeah. Letters from One Police Plaza had been stacking up unopened in his new SoHo apartment for months. He could guess that most of them required his immediate attention. One clue was a slew of stamped messages on the outside of last month’s envelopes, words in red ink and capital letters, OPEN IMMEDIATELY. The heaviest one had been pushed under his door, and it had borne a more expansive wording in Mallory’s machine-perfect penmanship: Open this IMMEDIATELY, you bastard!

  “Well, I’m not much of a reader,” he said. “Haven’t touched a newspaper in six months.” Riker preferred to spend his time cocooning in the company of a quiet bartender. “But I do open some of my mail.” He held up both hands. “See? Paper cuts.” This was what came of handling dangerous utility bills in the evening hours after the lights had been turned off for nonpayment due to apathy.

  His partner was not amused, and he could hardly blame her. The young cop deserved a better explanation for her abandonment. Regardless of the circumstances, she took every desertion so personally. She had yet to forgive her foster parents for dying. Helen Markowitz had been wheeled away into surgery, then returned to her family as a corpse. Unfair. And Lou Markowitz, Riker’s oldest friend, had died in the line of duty. Kathy Mallory was not about to stand for any more defections.

  “Your leave time expired.” Her voice was a bit testy, and this was akin to Jo’s cat switching its tail. “You never showed up for the physical or the psych evaluation.” And that was an accusation. “They ran you out of the department on a medical discharge.” She leaned forward, a prelude to a lunge. “If you’d bothered to open your damn mail, you’d know that they pensioned you off.” She slammed her hand on the desk and sent papers flying to the floor. “Is that what you wanted?”

  Riker shrugged as if this meant nothing. It meant the world to him.

  She held up an envelope, and by its thickness, he guessed it was a twin to the one on his kitchen table at home. “This is the form to appeal your discharge. I’ve got Lieutenant Coffey’s signature. Now I need yours.” After pulling out the sheets and unfolding them, she pointed to a red X so large that he could find his signature line without the bifocals he never wore in public. Mallory had often pointed out to him that his refusal to wear eyeglasses was an absurd vanity in a man with a shabby wardrobe, scruffy shoes and a bad haircut. And she had also meant well on that occasion.

  She handed the heavy document across the desk. “Sign it,” she said to him, ordered him. “Then I’ll set up new dates for your exams.”

  He could not even touch it. “I’ll read the form tonight, okay?”

  No, that was obviously not okay, but she let the bundle of sheets fall from her hand to the desk, then leaned down to retrieve the crumpled ball he had tossed in the wastebasket. “Now, back to your hunchback, Johanna Apollo.”

  So that was the lady’s real name.

  Mallory tossed the wadded paper at him, and he caught it in one hand. Was she testing his reflexes—wondering if he could pass the police physical? Or had she guessed that he wa
s most afraid of the psychiatric test?

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” he said.

  She rose from her chair, braced both hands on the edge of the desk and stared him down, settling for no less than his complete attention. “But you never listen to the radio, do you, Riker?”

  2

  JOHANNA APOLLO’S EYES WERE DOWNCAST AS SHE crossed the avenue, moving toward the Italianate row houses along St. Luke’s Place. She lacked a hunchback’s gooseneck aspect, for she rarely raised her head to cope with the curious faces of strangers. Instead, she studied their feet, and, based solely upon the science of shoes, made personal judgments on her more upright fellowman. A cab stopped up ahead, and the trendy loafers of a soulless yuppie stepped out onto the pavement to cross paths with the dusty work boots of a blue-collar man who could not afford the rents in this Greenwich Village neighborhood. In her previous life, Johanna had often mused that she should have cultivated foot fetishists, for they would have had more to talk about.

  Behind her, she heard the hesitation steps of clicking high heels, some woman in a pedestrian dilemma of political correctness: how to get past the cripple on a sidewalk made narrower by lines of garbage cans? Impatience won out, and the shoes of an office girl walked abreast of her, hurrying to pass the leisurely hunchback. Without raising her head, Johanna knew the girl would be young. These were the dangerous spiked heels of an on-the-job man hunter, seeking fun or rescue in that other sex. The shoe design was flirty and flimsy, not made for the dead run at a moment’s notice—like now. Two rats slithered out of a mound of trash bags torn open by sharp little teeth. The office girl’s feet turned skittish, skipping to the side, followed by a sudden breathy surprise when she collided with a garbage pail and knocked it over.

  “Turn at the corner,” said Johanna, raising her eyes to the younger woman’s face. “The vermin aren’t your worst problem.” She pointed toward the ragged man standing in the center of the sidewalk on the next block.

  And now that the beggar had an audience, his arms raised slowly, then flapped up and down in the manner of demented pump handles. Bunny was what he called himself, but Johanna knew him by all his street names: Bum, Fool, and You Crazy Son of a Bitch. He was waiting for his tribute money, but first—a little fun, another fright night.

  The office girl obediently turned at the corner to take another route to the subway station. Johanna did not. As she closed the distance between herself and the homeless man, she raised her face once more and sighed, resigned to the trial ahead.

  Behind a fringe of matted hair was the pug nose of a boy and a grin that insisted on innocence. Bunny’s face belied the adage that the homeless life aged people well beyond their years. Though he was in his thirties, she always saw him as a child. Closer now, Johanna stared at one blackened ankle. It was too late to save his foot. Soon the skin would slough away, and he would die from massive infection. Ah, but his shoes said more—the cold wind leaking in, life leaking out, tired leather parting with the sole and showing a peek at sockless, gangrenous toes. By the shoes alone, she knew that he had been defeated in two great themes of the ancient Greeks: man against nature, and man against himself. He stank of disease and soiled underwear.

  Bunny’s hand struck out and batted the air an inch from her face. She had dodged the first shot and neatly evaded the second, yet she was falling, her feet slip-sliding on marbles that crashed to the sidewalk from Bunny’s outstretched hand.

  She hit the ground and felt the searing pain of her elbow smashing into cement. The agitated man stood over her, waving his arms, though this was hardly frightening. His hands were arthritic claws after too many winters without the protection of gloves. He could barely make a fist, and any damage he might do unto others would hurt Bunny more. Nevertheless, she raised her hands in surrender. “I’ve got money,” she said, and these ritual words appeased him, as they always did.

  She rose to her feet, careful to avoid the other marbles around her work boots. And now she must keep Bunny still, or he might fall and break a bone. Such an injury could mean death for a man in his shape and circumstance. She handed him the same ten-dollar toll she paid each time they met. “Well, Bunny, you learned a new trick tonight. The marbles. That was very smart.”

  He had finally found a means to keep people from running away at the first sign of madness. But she knew this trick was well beyond his reasoning ability. It was also a bad joke, the cliché of lost marbles, lost mind. And whose sick bit of humor was this? Had some neighborhood child taught him the new stunt? It hardly mattered. He would forget it in a few hours’ time. Short-term memory also had a way of outrunning Bunny.

  “You’re quick. That’s what he says.” Bunny tapped his head in a knowing way and made a sly face as he looked down at the fallen marbles. “He gave me those. Says I gotta play it smart to catch—Oh, oh, ooooh.” He laughed and shifted his weight from foot to foot in a bob and a weave, so excited. “I got a message for you.” His eyes closed and his teeth clenched in fierce concentration. And now he had it, and his eyes opened wide. “It’s a message from Timothy Kidd. He says it’s real cold in hell, and ain’t that a surprise.”

  Johanna’s mouth rounded in a silent No!

  “Where did you hear that name?” Was there a siren of alarm in her voice? Yes, but it was well beyond the pitch of Bunny’s impaired perception. He had no empathy with the fears of others. “Tell me—where did you hear that name?”

  Bunny kept tapping his skull. “In here. He lives with me.”

  It was useless to pursue this little horror, impossible to distinguish between Bunny’s real and imagined people, though she knew the messenger was a living human being, someone who had spent a great deal of time with the homeless man. Only constant repetition over days and days would have made that sentence remain in his mind; it was so crowded in Bunny’s head, where so many people talked to him all the time.

  Johanna pulled a newspaper from one of the trash cans and used it to sweep the marbles off the sidewalk so he would not trip and hurt himself. Should she call the police? And tell them what? From NYPD’s point of view, it was the rest of the citizenry who needed protection from Bunny. She shook her head, giving up on the idea of asking them to look after the homeless man. From now on, she would take a different route home from work, and perhaps that would keep Bunny from harm. As the last marble rolled off the curb, her injured elbow throbbed with pain, and this was only the first leg of her gauntlet. There was still the cat to deal with at the other end of her odyssey.

  At the West Fourth Street station, she boarded a subway car crammed with passengers who made space to accommodate her. Johanna was that rare straphanger who was offered a seat by men, women and, most humiliating—children. During the short ride home, she observed the egalitarian meeting of the city’s shoes, real leather and faux, sneakers and oxfords.

  Out of the subway, tired and sore, she made her way down Twenty-third Street, heading toward her hotel. The Chelsea was a bastard castle, Victorian and Gothic, striped with long rows of wrought-iron balconies and crowned on the twelfth floor with tall chimneys and dormer windows set into a pitched gray roof. All told, the redbrick giant had two hundred windows overlooking the street. It was not the tallest building in this neighborhood of lesser architecture, but certainly the grandest.

  Grandeur ended as Johanna passed through the front door.

  The lobby was rimmed with nineteen-sixties track lights surrounding the crystal chandelier of a more distant period, and the statue of a fat pink girl perched upon a swing was also suspended from the high ceiling. Abstract pieces of sculpture sat on the marble floor beside contemporary and antique furniture, and the walls were covered with the large canvases of an ever-changing art show. The eclecticism was so extreme that nothing—not a live elephant—nothing would seem out of place here. And then there were the tenants, permanent and transient: the Chelsea was a haven for certifiable creative types, artists and the like, and proudly advert
ised itself as haunted by a history of suicide and murder. In the past four months of residence, Johanna had encountered no earthbound spirits other than the ghosts she had checked in with, ten of them, including Timothy Kidd.

  She crossed the dark carpet, eyes fixed on a parade of luggage on wheels and the out-of-town shoes of visitors. Only one pair was familiar, spit-shine black and memorable for the broken laces and the knotty repairs. They were ten steps in front of her, when she raised her head to see the FBI agent, Marvin Argus, approach the front desk. Johanna waved at the clerk, begging him in dumb show not to give her away as she rounded the corner and pushed the elevator button. The door slid open, and she slipped inside.

  Moving through the Chelsea in any direction was like a trip through time and other places. She rode upward in a small box with midcentury gas station decor. Its doors opened onto the seventh-floor foyer and an ornate staircase from her exchange-student days in Paris. Turning left, she opened a fire door of wood and glass and passed into a silent corridor leading to her rear apartment and its tall windows with southern plantation shutters. The last skirmish of the day lay before her as she fitted a key into her lock. The moment she cracked the door open, a white furry paw appeared, claws extended and swatting air, so anxious to get at all comers and rake them till they bled.

  Johanna lived with New York City’s only attack cat.

  She guessed that her apartment had been cleaned late in the day, for Mugs was still angry and up for a fight. The formidable hotel maid always came armed with a water pistol to keep the cat at bay. Johanna had no such defenses, only denim jeans to protect her legs from the needle-sharp claws. She edged past the animal. Mugs followed her down the short hallway to the spacious front room with an armchair in front of the fireplace—so inviting—but before she even removed her coat, she quickly entered the kitchen. The cat would be hungry, and food would buy her a small respite from his attentions. On the days when she was feeling fragile, Mugs was locked in a bathroom, but most of the time he roamed free, rubbing up against her legs, purring, then clawing her when he felt the agony of close association. A nerve along the cat’s spine had been damaged long before she found him, and any physical contact caused him excruciating pain. Yet Mugs came looking for love each time she walked into a room.