by Barbara Paul
He shrugged. “Look in here.” He led her to a room in which the outer wall was glass. She could see the park, three blocks away. “This is your office,” Holland said. “If you want it.”
She was overwhelmed at the size of the gesture. But at the same time, she felt a flash of anger. “Holland—”
He held up a hand. “I’m not putting pressure on you. Of course there is no obligation on your part. None whatsoever. What I am trying to do, quite blatantly, is to tempt you. Is it working? You’d select your own furniture, set your own hours, turn down any case you didn’t want—what else can I do to make this a dream job?” He paused. “I want you for my partner, Marian. Tell me what you want.”
She couldn’t think what to say. When the silence was beginning to grow uncomfortable, she surprised both of them by walking over to Holland and wrapping her arms around him. They stood there a long moment, holding on to each other, not speaking. Finally she said, “Wait until I have tonight out of the way. Then I’ll be free to decide.”
He didn’t answer, but held on just a little tighter.
Marian was of the opinion that Gloria Sanchez’s alternating of ethnic identities did not depend so much on the clothing she wore as on the way she wore them. Tuesday night Gloria had on a bright yellow tee with a safari jacket and jeans, plus enormous hoop earrings and lots of jangly bracelets. That morning’s careful curls had been replaced by a hair style that could only be described as wild. Gloria had put on a lot of eye make-up; her nails were bright red and seemed to have grown an inch during the day. But most of all her walk was different, her hand gestures were different, the way she tilted her head while listening was different. She affected a Hispanic accent, but that didn’t contribute to the overall picture so much as did the lilt in her voice when she spoke.
She’s part chameleon, Marian thought, feeling very plain next to her colorful friend. They’d left the car in a delivery zone near Cooper Square and were making their way down Bowery; still a half hour before midnight, the street was crowded and noisy. A lot of the street people looked like college kids, acting cool. A lot of the others … didn’t. Music seeped/poured/pounded out of half a dozen places; a loud-voiced argument raged nearby. The temporary team of Larch and Sanchez had decided to wait until Waltzing Brünnhilde’s final set of the evening, so Vasquez would be free afterward.
“Here ’tis,” said Gloria.
The management’s sole attempt at exterior decoration was the hanging of a metal canopy on which the words “The Esophagus” had been painted. The frontage was quite narrow. “Must be a basement club,” Marian said.
Sure enough, the door opened to reveal a landing from which a staircase descended. A man dressed very much like Gloria collected a fee from them, and they made their way down into what at first appeared to be almost total darkness. When Marian’s eyes had adjusted, she was not pleased at what she saw. The low lights couldn’t hide all the peeling paint, the grease on the walls several layers thick, the dirt and the litter. “It’s a rathole,” she muttered.
“Yeah,” Gloria agreed. “An’ a busy rathole, too.” All the tables were taken; they made their way to the bar where one stool stood empty; Marian told Gloria to take it and squeezed in between her and a skinny young fellow who had his back turned.
Waiting for the next set, the crowd was good-naturedly boisterous and noisy. Marian checked her watch. “Still a few more minutes.”
Gloria was reading the signs behind the bar. “I don’ beliv it—yuppie beer for seventy-fi’ cents? Hey, mon, bring me a Rollin’ Rock!”
“Make it two,” Marian said.
Now that her eyes had adjusted fully, Marian could see the room they were in was a large one, extending back perhaps even farther than the original depth of the building. The stage was opposite the bar at the far end; it was shallow and undecorated but surrounded by a small fortune in lighting equipment, none of it in use at the moment. The brightest thing in the room was a glowing red Exit sign on the left.
“Roberts was out sick today,” Gloria said unexpectedly. “So guess who I got partnered with.”
“Not Foley?”
Gloria made a face and nodded. “We went to check out a drive-by shootin’—nobuddy injured, jus’ a lot of broken glass and damage. Your former partner gets it into his so-called mind that a new gang war’s about to bust out. So he wan’s to start roustin’ all the gang members he knows, stir ’em up a little, you know? I kep’ tellin’ him he’d start a war, but he wouldn’ listen. I had to go to Captain DiFalco to stop ’im.”
“The man’s a menace.” Marian was quiet a moment, thinking of a time Foley’s undependability had put her in danger. “Is DiFalco going to do anything about him?”
“Naw. We got a manpower shortage, remember?” Gloria grinned. “We don’ even have a sergeant now.”
“Hm.”
Suddenly the stage lights blazed on, the stage erupted in a cacophony of electronic sound, and the audience started cheering and shouting. Waltzing Brünnhilde had arrived.
Marian looked, blinked, looked again. The four men on the stage were attired—if that was the word—in Jockey shorts.
“Why, those boys don’ have no pants on!” Gloria yelled delightedly.
The band ripped into a number that drowned out every other sound in the place. The lead singer was wearing Beetle Bailey boots and a black shirt that had only the bottom button fastened. He swung his head and his long black hair swept over the dead white skin of his exposed chest. That plus garish make-up gave him a vampirish look, a look that the bare white legs somehow enhanced. Two of the other band members were wearing sneakers and the fourth had on sandals; all three wore plain shirts that didn’t distract from the main man’s Dracula persona. Two of the band had ponytails … but one of them was blond. Marian looked over the heads of the audience at the other one, the man they’d come to find. Vasquez was every bit as hunkish as Kevin Kirby but without the other man’s attractive facial features and personable manner. Vasquez was big, heavily muscled, unsmiling. He held his guitar like a weapon, and he looked dangerous.
Waltzing Brünnhilde segued into a second song; it was aggressive, challenging—what had Kevin Kirby said? A more pissed-off sound than even speed metal. One or more members of the group frequently emphasized the fuck-you attitude of the music by giving the audience the finger. The audience loved it.
A brief pause followed the second song while the lead singer and the audience exchanged a few insults. Gloria said into Marian’s ear, “Do you know who that is? That’s Rex Regent. He useta be with the Sumo Surfers. What’s he doin’ in a dump like this?”
“I really don’t know,” Marian replied soberly.
The music started again. A strobe light was playing over the audience, while the stage went through a constantly changing play of colored light. Gloria gave Marian her bar stool as she herself started gyrating to the evening’s rhythms. As Waltzing Brünnhilde moved from song to song to give-and-take with the audience, Marian began to think it was never going to end. At one point Rex Regent mooned the audience. A few members of the audience returned the compliment.
The act came to a premature close when five members of the audience, three women and two men, clambered up on the stage and jumped Waltzing Brünnhilde’s lead singer. They tore his Jockey shorts off him and then fought among themselves for possession. Laughing, Rex Regent got to his feet and stood there a moment, making sure everyone got a good look, before turning and clomping off the stage, his army boots making hollow sounds in the wooden floor. The stage lights dimmed; the show was over.
Gloria looked at Marian in mock sorrow and said, “And you’re goin’ to resign a job that pays you to watch a dude get his underwear ripped off.”
Marian had to laugh. “True, there aren’t many jobs like that. But we’ve got a problem. How do you get through that?” That was about half the audience climbing up on the stage and pushing its way toward the backstage area. “You’ll never get to Vasquez through that
mob.”
“They’re after Rex Regent.” Gloria leaned over the bar and gestured to the bartender. “Is there another way to the dressin’ rooms?”
“See the Exit sign?” He pointed. “Don’t go up the stairs. Go down the hall, straight back.”
“Thanks, mon.” She and Marian exchanged a silent thumbs-up and Gloria headed for the Exit sign. Marian waited a few minutes and followed, but took the stairs up to the street instead of going backstage. She waited there, where they’d be coming out.
Once she was approached by a trio of young men looking for a lone woman to hassle, once by a man dressed as a clown who wanted to know how much she charged, and once by a uniformed officer who told her to move along. She got rid of all of them by flashing her badge.
It was nearly half an hour before Gloria and Vasquez appeared. Marian breathed a sigh of relief; the first hurdle was over. Keeping other people between them, she followed for about a block and a half, to a pizzeria; Vasquez was hungry after his gig. She peeked through the glass and saw Gloria doing the ordering for both of them. Marian checked the time: eleven minutes to two.
Gloria had twenty-four thousand dollars in her bag, twenty-four to avoid a too-pat round number. She was to tell Vasquez she could get her hands on three, maybe four more thousand. It was a nice piece of change for someone who played for scale in a rathole like The Esophagus and rented out his muscles to Ernie Nordstrom between gigs. Captain Murtaugh had had trouble getting the cash; the crime they were investigating was just too minor to risk that kind of money. But he had prevailed, somehow, and right now Gloria was doing her desperate-woman act, over pepperoni and anchovies. Thank god Xandria Priest had kept a diary.
Marian was stamping her feet to warm them when Vasquez finally came out—alone. He turned onto Bleecker Street; she fell in behind him and took a walkie-talkie out of her bag.
Before long it crackled. “Marian?”
“We’re heading west on Bleecker.” Just then two black teenagers saw her coming and separated just enough to block her way. “Don’t even think about it,” she snarled and plowed through. They let her go, contenting themselves with yelling a few obscenities after her. “Gloria? He’s going into the subway. IRT uptown.”
“Shit.” The radios would be useless. “I’ll get the car and stay on Third Avenue until I hear from you.”
“Right.”
It was what they’d planned, in case Vasquez took a subway or bus; but Marian had been hoping he’d feel flush enough to stop a cab. She followed him down into the subway. Past the turnstile, Vasquez looked around with studied casualness, his gaze passing over Marian to linger on a nondescript man reading a newspaper. Marian edged behind a vending machine.
The train roared into the station. She got into the car next to the one Vasquez took and stood at the rear, where she could keep an eye on him through the double windows. The man with the newspaper had boarded the same car as Vasquez.
They rode only three stops. Marian stepped behind a pillar as Vasquez waited to make sure the newspaper man was not getting off. Only when the train doors slid shut did he turn toward the exit stairs.
Up on the street, Marian pulled out the walkie-talkie. “Gloria? We’re heading east on Twenty-third, south side of the street.”
“Gotcha.”
Vasquez was turning right onto Second Avenue just as Gloria pulled up to the curb. Quickly she and Marian changed places, Gloria now following on foot. But Vasquez went only half a block farther, crossing the street to a white-stone apartment building. A doorman let him in.
So he’s known there, Marian thought, pulling up by a fire hydrant. She locked the car and met Gloria in the middle of the street, her heart beginning to pound as they got closer to their target. They ran up to the glass door of the building and banged on it with their fists, holding up their badges when the elderly doorman came to see what they wanted. He let them in.
“The man who just came in here,” Marian said. “You know him?”
The doorman nodded. “Mr. Norris’s nephew. He comes here a lot.”
So he wasn’t “Ernie Nordstrom” at home. “Which apartment?”
“Seven-oh-four. What’s going on?”
Neither Marian nor Gloria answered as they hurried to the one elevator and hit the button. The elevator was already on its way down, so they didn’t have long to wait. The doors opened … and Vasquez erupted from the elevator car like a sprinter training for the Olympics. “Stop!” Marian yelled.
He didn’t stop. Gloria was hard on his heels, though, and brought him down with a flying tackle just as he reached the door. Then Marian was on top of both of them, struggling to get a pair of cuffs on Vasquez. When she’d finally succeeded, all three of them sat panting on the floor. The elderly doorman shuffled as close as he dared. “What’s going on?” he complained.
Gloria pulled out her badge and held it in front of Vasquez’s face. He sighed in resignation … and then did a double take as he recognized Gloria. “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “Come on—get up.”
“What were you running from?” Marian asked him.
“He can’t understand you.” Gloria repeated the question in Spanish, to be answered by a stream of words that seemed to involve a great deal of repetition. “He keeps saying he didn’t do it.” She and Marian exchanged a look of apprehension. “Oh-oh.”
They got Vasquez to his feet and steered him toward the elevator. He hung back, until both women spoke to him in their tough-cop voices. He kept repeating that he didn’t do it.
“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on,” the doorman said waspishly as the elevator doors closed.
All the way up, Vasquez kept up a steady stream of protest until Gloria finally told him to shut up. The seventh floor consisted of one narrow hallway with apartments opening off both sides. The door to 704 was standing ajar.
The apartment was cold. Although she already had a good idea of what to expect, Marian felt her heart sink when they walked in and found the dead man on the floor. He’d been strangled with a fancy tasseled pull rope, the kind that was used to summon servants in Victorian homes. His tongue protruded from one side of his mouth and both eyes were open. The dead man was short, stocky, and middle-aged, and he was surrounded by movie and theater memorabilia. Ernie Nordstrom.
An agitated Vasquez was still protesting his innocence. Marian bent over and laid her palm alongside the dead man’s neck. “Rigor’s started,” she said. “Tell him we know he didn’t do it. Nordstrom’s been dead at least an hour, probably longer, since the room’s so chilly. And we know where Vasquez has been the past …”—she looked at her watch—“three hours and seven minutes. Tell him we’re his alibi.”
Gloria spoke to Vasquez at some length, and gradually he began to calm down. Marian motioned them out into the hallway and used a handkerchief to pull the door to after her. “I’ll go look for a phone and call it in,” she said. “Will you be all right here with him?”
“Oh sure,” Gloria said. “This boy ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Marian nodded and stepped back into the elevator. As the doors closed, she leaned tiredly against the side of the car. Whoever would have thought that her nice, easy, friendly little case was going to turn into a full-fledged homicide.
11
Captain Murtaugh looked as tired as Marian felt. Two uniformed officers had taken Vasquez in to be held for questioning, and the men from the Medical Examiner’s office had removed the body. But the Crime Scene Unit was taking longer than usual to finish up; all the stuff Ernie Nordstrom had accumulated made their job difficult. Gloria Sanchez was standing straight up with her eyes closed; Marian was convinced she was sound asleep. None of them could sit down, because there was no place to sit.
Ernie Nordstrom had lived in a one-bedroom apartment, if living was what it was. The bedroom held a narrow cot and a chest of drawers; in the living room was a desk and a chair; on the desk was a six-inch TV of the brand taken from the Broadhurst. And except for
a narrow pathway, every other inch of floor space was taken up with memorabilia. Clothes racks holding costumes, cardboard cartons marked with some cryptic code the dead man had devised, stacks of paper items, props, personal articles—Nordstrom had covered the spectrum of show biz collectibles. The kitchen cabinets were full of memorabilia, more costumes hung from the shower curtain rod and were draped across the foot of the cot, and the chair by the desk was stacked high with lobby cards. What little wall space there was, was filled with framed theater posters and photographs of actors and entertainers. Dealing was Ernie Nordstrom’s entire life.
“Cold in here,” Captain Murtaugh said. “Sanchez?” Gloria opened one eye. “The doorman claims Vasquez was Ernie Nordstrom’s nephew. Anything to that?”
“Nope, that was just Nordstrom’s cover story,” she said in accent-free English, “to explain Vasquez’s appearances here at all hours of the night.” She managed to get the other eye open. “Vasquez told me about it while we were waiting for the CSU to get here. The two didn’t look anything alike—it was a dumb cover. But Marian was right about Vasquez. He was just hired muscle. I don’t think he even knew what was going down half the time. He just lifted and carried whatever he was told.”
“Then Nordstrom must have spoken Spanish,” Murtaugh pointed out.
“Must have.”
Marian studied Gloria closely. Gone were the big earrings, the jangly bracelets, the bright yellow tee of earlier in the evening. The wild hairdo had been tucked under a black cap, and the safari jacket had been reversed to show a dark green corduroy—which she now wore over a black sweater. No wonder Vasquez hadn’t recognized her at first; she was a different woman. She was neither Whoopi Goldberg nor Chita Rivera.
“Gloria,” Marian said, bemused, “you look like … yourself.”
“Yeah. I figured nobody’d know me this way.”
Gloria and Vasquez had hit it off right from the start, backstage at The Esophagus. Everyone else was crowding around Rex Regent; so when Gloria made a beeline for Vasquez, he’d felt puffed up and receptive. He told her she looked like Elizabeth Peña; she told him he had better pecs than Ahnold. Matters were progressing nicely until the subject of the diary came up. It had taken Gloria a long time to get Vasquez to overcome his initial suspicion; but when they were in the pizza parlor, she’d shown him the cash she was carrying and promised to get more. That had started the wheels turning in Vasquez’s head. If that diary was worth twenty-four-thousand-plus to this woman who’d appeared out of nowhere, might it not be worth even more to somebody else? In fact, couldn’t there be dozens of people whose dirty secrets were recorded in the diary? The trouble was, Vasquez couldn’t read much English.
